Less Than Zero
by Kenchi618
Summary: It's one thing to enter the world of heroes and villains, it's another thing entirely to find your way back out again. That's a bitter truth to swallow when you want no part of the life to begin with. A hasty decision from a young man with his back against the wall sends him down a path of which there is no return. OC main character.
1. A Hasty Last Resort

**Oh God… what am I doing here? **_**So**_** far out of my comfort zone right now.**

**Eh, I've put this off long enough. Time to go for it.**

**Alright, I'm Kenchi618, and this is my attempt at taking a stab at putting together an intriguing story in the deep and at times confusing DC Universe. Bear with me here. I'm going to give it my best shot, so let's see what I've got up my sleeve.**

**And of course, I do not own anything DC-related.**

**Less Than Zero**

**Chapter 1: A Hasty Last Resort**

* * *

"Max."

One could stare for hours and find nothing particularly extraordinary about Max. A fair-toned boy, atop his head sat a dirty-blond mop of hair, and behind tired lids sat unremarkable brown eyes. Covering a moderate, slim teenage build was a black concert t-shirt and blue jeans.

"Max. Pay attention."

He needed all of the sleep he could get when he could get it. The second school let out he had to run to his job, and that would keep him out until after midnight. The more hours he could work the better, as that meant a little bit longer he could keep his parents' old place. Without it he wouldn't have anywhere to go.

"Max!"

Having his name hissed directly in his ear jolted the young man almost off of his stool and onto the floor had he not caught himself on the edge of the lab desk. He found himself facing an exasperated glare from his lab partner. Understandable, as he had been trying to catch a power nap in the middle of an assignment,

All Max could do was give her an apologetic look. No excuses. Never excuses, "Sorry Barb," He said with a hint of an indistinguishable accent.

And he was. Most guys would have been chomping at the bit and wide awake in lab when they found out they would be the lab partner of Barbara Gordon. On the other hand she must have felt like working with him was like dragging along an anchor. It was a shame, she was quite incredible.

Long red hair, stunning green eyes, and a body to go with it all. Unfortunately, Max knew where he stood in regards to that sort of thing going anything past her knowing his name; somewhere in the neighborhood of 'fat chance' and 'snowball's chance in hell'. They definitely weren't friends. Even saying they were acquaintances was a stretch.

Yes, she was gorgeous, but girls like that weren't into guys like him. She had the best grades, was by far the most athletic girl at the school, was the daughter of Gotham's police commissioner, and she was already doing work after classes with Wayne Industries.

He was just the kid of some failed commercial scientists who were no longer amongst the living.

Barbara sighed and shook her head, gesturing to the experiment before them that she had already completed, "It's fine. It's actually faster without all of the bumbling working together stuff," She tapped the packet on the lab table that was fully filled out, gesturing for Max to fill in where his name was meant to go, "…You know, if you tried a little harder who knows what you could do? I've seen your grades. You don't even study."

Max laughed and gratefully put his name on the page, "I try plenty hard. Trust me," He didn't have the time to study. He was hardly able to find the time to do enough homework to keep a decent grade-point average.

Barbara pursed her lips but didn't say anything. Because of 'extracurricular' affairs she was very attentive to what went on around her. She knew full well that Max had lost his parents, the last one over half a year ago, even if he never told anyone or even let it go beyond the people at the school who absolutely had to know that it happened. He simply missed a few days and came back without missing a beat.

But that beat began to slip, because he had to provide for himself. He had no family stateside. He stopped playing sports, and even stopped coming to school every day. He never asked for help or even let anyone know that he was on his own, out of pride or for whatever reason. And no one cared. This was the wrong town for that.

The bell rang and Max stood up before she did, grabbing the packet and putting a hand on her shoulder as he went past to turn it in, "Thanks, and if there's something I can do later on I owe you one."

"Just happy to help," Barbara said lamely as she watched him go. In the end, it wasn't any of her business.

XxX

Well after two in the morning, Max entered his apartment and locked the door behind him, dropping his backpack at the door and flopping face down on the sofa, not even taking his shoes off first and completely ignoring the notice that had been slipped under his door in his absence. His home was a simple one-bedroom apartment. It wasn't exactly in a nice part of town, but it could have been worse.

He dozed off for three hours before waking up and pushing himself up weakly. Two more hours before he had to wake up for school.

With a sigh, Max looked around his dark apartment, still containing this and that from before his father died six months prior. Just thinking about it angered him, but it was a dull anger. The kind that you knew you couldn't do anything about.

His mother and father were both commercial scientists who had made their living when he'd been younger designing and working with teams on technology that S.T.A.R. Labs and other technological powerhouses turned for huge dollars. Then one day that all came to an end, and things grew tough. But they never stopped working. They worked more than they paid attention to him.

And then they both died, one after the other, not too long after one another. But their work had taken them away from him way before death had. He grieved, but not for long. Because there wasn't any room for it. The world didn't care about your excuses.

They left him alone, with no contingency. No contact with anyone that could take him in, or help him. No money to help him get by. No system worked out. It was enough to make him laugh if it wasn't so pathetic.

What was he going to do, become a ward of the state? To hell with that. Adoption? Not a chance. He was sixteen, so it was too late for that to work out for him, even if he did want that sort of thing which he most assuredly did not.

And now the rest of his days would have to be spent eking out what he could with odd jobs? Before he was even old enough to have a fighting chance at a start? No. If he was going to go down, it was going to be because he made his own stupid mistakes to put himself in the hole. Age be damned, he was going to find a way out.

Enough of the nine-to-five crap. Even if he ever got to college, then what? He wouldn't even be able to pay his way through. Not like this.

Jumping up with a grit to his teeth, Max stomped with a purpose and began digging through everything he could get his hands on that he knew belonged to his parents. Scribbled notes, unfinished designs that were nothing more than gibberish to him, and assorted parts that at one point in time might have been used to actually make something, but Max couldn't make heads nor tails of any of it.

Inside of the one room that he and his father shared, he tore through the closet, drawers, anything he could look behind, underneath, or within to find something worthwhile.

Eventually he came across a case that smelled relatively new and looked important. He definitely hadn't seen it before, but then again after they'd moved in and before his dad started getting sick he didn't remember noticing much of anything. All of it revolved around his dad's work, and his work made him angry to think of.

So upset was he, that he barely noticed the fingerprint scanner on the front that he'd brushed his thumb over, causing the case to open with a hiss much to his surprise. Upon opening the case he found a folded-up suit and other little instruments to go along with it.

A onesie? The thought was more than a little irritating as he pulled it out and looked at it. He'd been nervous about finding something or getting kicked out of his home, and he wound up finding a suit.

It was a dark green one-piece bodysuit with porous fibers and padded bands around the joints of the limbs. On the exterior they were as hard as metal, but on the inside they were easily moveable, allowing the wearer to bend. It covered every part of his body up to the second knuckle of his fingers.

"Ugh… kinda tight," Max grunted, feeling the suit meld to every nook and cranny on his body it could find, even between his fingers and toes, and there was an uncomfortable tingle to it. Sharp, as if his entire body was taking one constant jolt of weak electricity. It was quick to adjust to him though, a snug and comfortable fit, like a second set of skin. He almost felt naked.

Okay. So a suit. Sweet. Unless it actually did something he was still out of luck.

But as he thought about it, it made him feel… kind of super actually. Smiling at the thought, he bounced on his toes and honestly believed that he'd never felt so light. It was as if his body weight hardly existed. Feeling as if he could go out and win a slam dunk competition he took a hop and promptly drilled his head off of the ceiling.

Falling into a heap on the floor he held his mouth after biting his tongue, "Ahhhh."

Pain aside, the important thing was that he hadn't even tried. He'd barely pushed his toes off of the ground.

…What was this suit? He felt great and everything he did felt enhanced. How? It was like something out of a comic strip. Like the first scene of some sort of hero's story.

But the thing about everything was that Max wasn't some sort of hero, and he didn't want a story. He just wanted to live without worries.

And he was young enough to think that things could really be that simple the way he wanted to go about it.

XxX

Over the next few days, he couldn't stop thinking about the future. He'd worked with controlling his reactions in the suit and realized that everything he'd ever picked up from playing sports in the past, every bit of athleticism he'd ever garnered, was bolstered heavily. He reacted quicker. It was great.

Every time he woke up he looked at the suit and went to school and to work, just thinking about the day he'd take a chance and take what he wanted. It would come soon.

When the weekend fell, he started looking around the city for something to try and take first. Something that would get him a bit of change. Enough at least to pay his rent for a good while and keep him fed. Enough to leave that job of his behind.

Even though he knew it was dumb and it was out of his league, his attention wound up being drawn to an open exhibit of jewelry that would only be in town for two days before continuing on a tour of the world.

Walking around and viewing everything inside that could probably be fenced for a fortune put a silly look on his face the entire time he stayed there. Images of sitting in a posh, luxurious penthouse suite, or even a spacious townhouse uptown flew through his head.

As he stood in front of a glass display of a large diamond behind several armed guards and ropes, he felt the presence of someone slightly shorter standing right next to him, apparently observing the diamond as well, until he felt the uncomfortable sensation of being watched and realized that she'd been looking right at him with striking blue eyes.

A full-grown woman who couldn't have been much older than twenty-five if she was even that old, she smirked at him and tucked strands of her long dark hair behind her ear. Her attire was like night and day compared to his when it came to representation of class. She wore a black jacket over a blood red dress and an expensive piece around her neck, as well as black shoes so fine, Max felt he could have pawned everything in his pockets and on his back and still wouldn't have been able to afford a single one of them.

The woman leaned in close, making it clear she was speaking only to him and didn't want anyone else to hear, "Kid you are making it _way_ too obvious what you're here for."

"W-What?"

The woman grinned at Max with an expression that he could only compare to that of a cat. One that had knowingly eaten the family's canary. It made him want to stay away actually, her beauty aside. But he couldn't. Because he could tell that she knew something he didn't.

Everything.

"Don't have eyes too big for your stomach," She said, blue eyes shining in amusement as she brushed his face with her fingers, "You should head on home. Watching a few movies doesn't get you ready for something like that."

Max's slackened jaw quickly snapped shut and he followed the woman out, trying not to make it look like he was pestering her. Every step he lagged behind her seemed to amuse her even further. She hadn't told him to get lost, so he wanted to find out just what he was missing.

"I wasn't thinking of stealing that you know," Max said, more of his accent breaking through as he found himself at a loss, "That's totally not my thing."

The woman spared him another glance without stopping her stride and let out another laugh, "Jewels are everyone's thing kid. But for the few that actually want to take them, even less of them know how to," The two fell into a silence as the smartly dressed woman navigated the streets of Gotham, the kid following her no matter what street she crossed, 'He's not going to try and mug me, so what is it?'

She took him through an alley where no one would see or hear anything and all he did was follow. He didn't try a thing. She didn't even think he had a knife on him.

Eventually she tired of walking with a shadow and hailed a cab, and that was where she found he would not or could not follow. As she got inside and got herself situated she noticed the frown on Max's face as he watched her. It took a bit of curiosity and determination to follow someone he didn't know as far as he did from the open house, but he had limits.

…That was somewhat respectable.

"Do you need a ride home kid?" She eventually said, scooting over to make room for him?

Max looked around, not believing at first that she was talking to him, "Uh, yes?"

"Well I'm not taking you yet. I'm going to shop for a few things, so carry my bags for me and I'll take you home later."

Was he really going to say no to that?

XxX

(Later that Afternoon)

Through a quick introductory exchange, Max learned her name; Selina Kyle. And while he didn't catch her occupation, he did pick up on the thinly veiled fact that she knew what she was talking about when it came to taking what she wanted. For hours she humored him, listened to him, and rebutted when he was severely off about something he'd been saying.

It was the most productive day he could remember having in years.

Eventually, arms full of bags containing Selina's high-end purchases, she brought him to her place and didn't simply tell him to get lost after they got to the doorman of her building.

He'd been dead-on when he tried to figure what kind of woman she was. She had a taste for the finer things, and she had them in spades.

She didn't seem to be much of a fan of his though.

"No-no-no. Here's the thing! I don't need to!" Max said, excited at the thought of doing something so… so wrong, and getting away with it, "I'm not gonna fight, I'm just gonna steal. I just need to be good enough at enough stuff to handle what I need to."

"Uh-huh," Selina said, completely unimpressed by him as she sat and listened, "Well that's the general idea kid. You're not supposed to want to get into trouble. Not unless you're one of those flamboyant crooks that like to go after heroes' neck," The complete look of distaste on his face put a grin on hers, "Well it looks like you're not totally in over your head if you know your chances of getting away if you go toe-to-toe with them."

"I'll do small-time stuff."

"Won't work. If you keep pulling things off and getting away with it, eventually you'll run into dear old Batman," Selina said, lazily filing her nails as she tried to persuade the boy that his choice was not the wisest course of action.

She stopped and thought about it for a moment. With the fact that the bulk of Gotham City's more egregious crimes were being committed by true supervillains that intended to cause true and legitimate harm to the general population, the chances that a mere thief would be left alone by Batman existed, especially one that was small potatoes.

Even so…

"…Well with the Justice League calling on him, maybe not Batman himself, but you'll wind up tangling with one of the kids he keeps with him," Selina amended, sparing Max a partial glance for a moment, "I'm pretty sure they'll still put you into the ground if you run into them."

Damn, Max had forgotten all about them. Robin and Batgirl. There was more to this than he'd thought. Sitting on the couch in Selina's penthouse he thought to himself, but nothing seemed to come, "I'll-. I'll-, ugh. I don't know."

"Leave Gotham City and go somewhere else," Selina advised, deciding to throw him a bone. He just looked so pathetic, "This isn't exactly a good place to get your feet wet. Sharks are more than willing to take them off for you."

"No money to go anywhere else," Max reasoned with a mumble, "That's why I'm doing this. I'll be out on my ass with nothing and nowhere to go in less than two months at best. Then what?"

"Play a sport," Selina said, trying to coax the young man out of doing something he didn't know the first thing about, "Get a scholarship or something. Go pro."

"I tried playing everything I could before my parents died," Max said, "That'd take too long even if I had been any good at any of it. I can't do that and stay off of the streets y'know?"

"You really think you don't have any other options do you?"

"If you have one that's realistic, I'm all ears," Max said earnestly, "Hit me."

"Street racer."

"Where am I getting the car from, how am I paying for upgrades, how am I buying into the races, and what if I lose?"

"Prizefighter. Kids go pro all the time."

"No money to train," And if he were that good at martial arts, he would have already tried that path.

"_Underground_ prizefighter."

"Not enough money to be worth it."

"True, true," Selina thought stroking her chin as she had started making a game out of it. Anything but a thief, and anyone but her as the one he'd go to for advice. She wasn't some sort of mentor looking for a sidekick, and he'd wind up becoming nothing but competition otherwise, "Have you considered doing something… I don't know, legal?"

"Sure," Max replied, "But everything legal I can do or might be able to do to fix this takes time," As in months, or years, "I don't have any. I've got like 60 days."

And he'd already said in so many words just what would happen at the end of that time span. Either he'd be getting kicked out of somewhere or something else along those lines would happen. Aside from that, the kid had a point. There wasn't anything legal he could do that would solve his problem fast enough.

She could relate. Things hadn't always been so smooth for her either.

Putting her file aside, Selina stood up and gestured for Max to do the same, "Hands up," Immediately, Max did as he was told and slid his body into a ready position for a fight. Not bad posture for a kid, especially something on the spot, "You're trained?"

"Rec kickboxing classes when you're a little kid don't really count do they?" Max asked before finding himself knocked off of his feet and onto his back from behind, "Hey!"

"As a base, yes. Practically, no," Selina said, moving away to a more open place in the penthouse living room, "Watch out for that coffee table by the way. It's worth more than you are. Now come and hit me."

Max got up to one knee, but felt a pit in his stomach at having to hit a woman. It wasn't really his thing, "Uh…"

The look on her face seemed as if this would be more amusing than any sort of threat against her, "Hit me one time or grab a hold of me somehow, and I will teach you everything I possibly can in four weeks."

"…"

His reluctance to break a social taboo gave him pause for a moment. Selina gave him no time to think it over before pushing the issue, knowing exactly which point to press to spur him into action.

"It's up to you. You can either suck it up and hit a girl, or you can go and see if whatever's left of the Falcone Family needs any couriers. I'm sure that's an entry-level spot that'll help you break into gooning-," She was almost impressed with the certainty behind the punch he flew at her with. It missed miserably, but there was no hesitance whatsoever, "That was good try," She damn near purred in interest.

Max kept his hands up and slowly shuffled his feet in her direction, having taken his shoes off immediately upon entering her house to keep from besmirching her floors, "You're gonna start hitting me back aren't you?"

"Not necessarily."

XxX

(Forty Minutes Later)

She didn't start hitting him back, but that didn't mean she'd let him take lunges at her and refrain from punishing him in some manner. Her bare nails were wickedly sharp, and she had no problems with using him like a kitty-cat's scratching post. Aside from that, tripping him face-first into walls and counters, flipping him upside-down and inside-out, forcing him to bump his head on end tables, everything was fair game to deter him.

Selina figured he'd endure as much abuse as one boy could, and then he would quit, but he took more and more.

Max was exhausted and covered in bloody scratches all over his face and arms, including a particularly ugly one going down his face over and under his eye, but in his hand he held Selina's wrist, "Does that count?" He asked between heavy breaths.

"I didn't think you'd let me gouge your eye out just to grab me," Selina admitted, a small measure of surprise in her voice. Then again, she also thought he'd quit ten minutes into it.

"You stopped."

"I didn't _want _to gouge your eye out! You're just a kid!" She snapped back at him before realizing that he'd fulfilled her condition, "Well, I guess that's what I get for wanting to let you dangle and have a little fun. I didn't think you had much in you."

She could have knocked him unconscious whenever she wanted, but for some reason she didn't. If she could do that so easily, one of Batman's kids would massacre him. Even if she let him alone, he'd still give the criminal thing a try, and he'd wind up in jail before he ever got close to anything he wanted.

Max weakly let her go and Selina looked down at her arm to see a red mark on her wrist from his grip. She was getting so soft.

"Four weeks," The woman eventually said, holding up four fingers, "Give me four weeks, listen to everything I say, and keep your trap shut. If you ever get caught, you learned all of this from no one. Don't come back here again," She got a serious nod from Max and waved him off, "Now go home and clean yourself up. I don't know about you, but I could use a nice long bath."

XxX

(The Next Day)

"Max, what happened to your face?"

Max had been getting that question all day long, but he winced especially hard when he'd heard it from Barbara of all people. She seemed to be the only one that cared enough to be particularly startled at his appearance.

Seeing as how she had to sit directly next to him for one hour every day, it was probably the reason behind any sort of concerned interest she had. If she was going to be front and center to look at his scratched up mug every day, it was better to get the question out of the way sooner rather than later.

He had a feeling times would come when he would have to throw out quite a few excuses to keep people off of his back in the first place, so it was better to get into the habit before it became a big issue.

"Work is probably gonna be a little rougher for me at night," Max told her, touching one of the raised scratches on his face, still feeling the soreness on his entire body. Selina had made mincemeat out of him, "I'll probably be looking something like this for a while."

"What do you even do?"

"Whatever I need to I guess."

XxX

(Later That Night)

Max didn't call in to work. The day before he'd left a message that he wasn't coming back. It was all or nothing here and he was going to make sure he gave it his best. If it failed, no one would ever be able to say that he didn't dedicate himself to anything completely. Either this worked out, or nothing would.

If he couldn't even dedicate himself to what he himself had even considered the easy route, what good was he to the world at all? He was nothing as it was. To give up and quit at what he had already considered his last resort, that would make him even worse than a loser. It would make him less than a zero.

Sleep was the most important first and foremost. He didn't know when he'd be coming back, or if he would at all, so it was best to make sure that he was actually rested and prepared to give his best effort once it all began.

It came easier than he had anticipated.

Max figured he would have been a bundle of jittery nerves, unable to close his eyes and relax, but there was a stark sobriety to resigning oneself to a task. Figuring that something had to be done was oftentimes a method of coping with just how big or how real a situation was. Once he started, he wouldn't be able to stop. Not until he'd gotten enough money to guarantee he could try and have a real life.

A relatively peaceful sleep was disturbed by the sound of his front door opening and closing. Strange, because he knew he'd locked it.

Sitting up bleary-eyed he was presented with the sight of the woman meant to instruct him, or at least it was who he figured to be. It was a shapely woman for certain, but her identity was obscured by her choice of attire.

Selina wore knee-high boots and a black, skin-tight, zip-up suit with a goggled cowl on her head, pointed like a pair of cat-ears. The gloves that covered her hands seemed to have built in claws on them. Judging from what she could do with her bare nails, Max wasn't eager to see what she could do with those.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she beat him to it, "First thing's first. No names. If you have to, find something else to call yourself. Catwoman for example," Easy enough to remember and it made sense, "Purrrfect, right?"

"Original. Did you give yourself that one?" Max dryly quipped before leaning back as far as he could, Selina's claws having extended, gently touching the underside of his chin, "Err… I get it though."

"I'd love to see you come up with something better Maxie," Catwoman said before guiding him to his feet and pointing for his back rooms, "Go get ready. We're wasting time. I've got four weeks to make something serviceable out of you."

Not necessarily wanting to get scratched so early in the night, Max hastily went into the bedroom and went for the case containing the special suit. He still hadn't learned how it worked, but he knew what it did and how to use it by now. It was simple enough. Put it on, get enhanced.

If Selina thought he'd been a pushover before, wait until she got a load of him in the suit. And that sort of thinking made him pause in his actions.

'No,' Max thought to himself right before he started to change into the suit, 'She's expecting what she got yesterday. Any training she's got ready for me is taking what she already knows into account,' It was the only reason aside from deterring him altogether that Catwoman would have had for fighting with him.

If he came out of the gates blowing her expectations away, it would screw up anything Catwoman had planned for him. Besides, he had a feeling that the suit would enhance whatever he was capable of once he put it on. Wouldn't it be better to let his body suffer through whatever she had set now without the suit only to reap the benefits twice as much afterwards?

It would make everything so much easier, but would easier be better? That was the idea that had started all of this, but the easy way here definitely wasn't the better way. He'd take whatever she had on his feet and stay standing. If he could do that, only then would he wear the suit.

"Are you getting cold feet Maxie?"

Replacing the case where he found it, Max quickly threw on some expendable clothes that he could move around in and a stocking cap to at least try and hide the trait of his hair, just in case. He hustled back to cat burglar lazing on his couch, looking at a stray note left by his parents, bored with waiting, "Ready."

Having gotten her attention, he watched her smirk and get back up, giving him a once-over, much like she had in her penthouse the day they'd met, "No you're not. But you will be."

First and foremost she'd guided him to the roof and on the way challenged him to keep up with her making as little sound as he could. Sneaking through the halls of an apartment building was simple, and if he couldn't do that he didn't have a chance of ever being a decent thief that didn't take the smash and grab approach. She wasn't going to put any effort into teaching a brute whose first option would be to tear the door off of a safe or kick in a locked door.

Upon reaching the roof, Catwoman looked around at the late night sky with a smile on her lips, "Okay, first and foremost, learn how to move. You're in decent shape, but you need to be better. So here's what you're going to do. You follow me and keep up. That's all you have to do."

Max's eyes went wide when he realized that she was going to make him run and jump rooftops with her. Without another word she started, and Max lagged behind, trying to keep up and watch what she did.

"To keep from outright getting you killed, I won't distances I need my whip to cover," Catwoman said, right before vaulting over an alleyway with a nimble flip, landing on the other side as smooth as silk, "This is all me."

Gritting his teeth, Max reached the edge and threw his body forward with everything he had. To his relief he landed on the other side, only to be met with a shake of the head from Catwoman, "What's wrong? I made it," He didn't want to see how his body would handle a ten-story fall after all.

"By three feet," Catwoman pointed out, "You put everything you had into one jump. That's wasted effort. You do that while you're being chased, whoever's after you will clobber you while you're recovering from the landing," She turned his head back to the gap, "Gauge distance and elevation when you clear a gap to save time and energy when you do it. Trust me. Your body instinctually knows what it's capable of."

Max nodded and they continued on. Most of the first night was spent simply learning how to move along rooftops and traverse obstacles. Simple enough in theory, but he looked and felt a mess every single night after they had gone over it.

XxX

(Two Weeks Later)

"Killer Croc."

"Run. Get high up and run."

"Good. The Penguin," Catwoman continued, watching Max slowly make his way through her laser alarm course, "…With a handful of henchmen."

"Negotiate, or fight," Max answered, sweat covering his face as he put the flexibility of his body to the test. He wasn't anywhere close to Catwoman, but he was athletic enough to do what he needed to within the realm of reasonability. He wasn't some contortionist, and he had learned tricks otherwise to beat lasers if and when they came up.

"Calendar Man."

"Beat the shit out of him."

Week two dipped into practical burglary, and lessons on what to do if everything failed and he wound up having to face off with some of Gotham City's most notable visitors and residents. Catwoman had set up a share of obstacle courses in a warehouse where no one would bother the two of them while she educated him.

All of the answers fell into four categories. Either you could outright run, fight as much as you needed to in order to get away, suggest a team-up, or surrender. Catwoman didn't surrender, but she suggested to Max that he was better off keeping the option open. He was brand new and it wouldn't do to get him maimed or killed by telling him to never be taken without a fight.

"Joker."

"Fucking run and hope he didn't see my face."

A smile tugged at Selina's lips upon hearing that. The idea of getting involved with the meta-human criminals and superheroes that looked to be multiplying seemed to be the absolute last thing that Max wanted in the world, "Let's switch it up. Superman."

Max paused in the middle of his movement over a red laser and turned his head far enough to give her an incredulous look, "That's a trick question! No Metropolis! You said _never_ go to Metropolis! It's not worth it."

"-Because you won't be able to get away from Superman no matter what you try, and whatever you steal will most likely be LexCorp's to begin with, which has a whole new set of problems. You're listening," Catwoman said, stroking a black cat that had come along with her to keep her company while she taught, "Now let's go over capes that you'll realistically end up facing, shall we?"

XxX

(One Week Later)

Catwoman observed Max's movements as he hit a human-shaped dummy with everything she'd been able to unload on him combat-wise in regards to technique. Pursing her lips she looked over his handiwork as he struck. Everything he took aim at was meant to debilitate and slow down an enemy. She wasn't expecting him to outright beat anyone down. There was only so much she could do with a handful of weeks to get him up to speed.

In close, Max shot his lead hand forward, feigning a jab but smacking his forearm off of the windpipe of the dummy, hooking his hand on the shoulder or collarbone of the dummy and pulling it in for a knee to the groin and an elbow to the head and neck.

"Nice," Catwoman said, "Don't be gentle about it. If you think a blow will give you an opening to get away, go for it. If you think you can put someone down you'd better do it. Heroes won't kill you, but they won't mess around with you either. They'll hurt you."

Standing behind him, a mischievous grin found its way to her face.

Continuing his practice onslaught, Max felt a hand on his shoulder and a quick pull along with a foot tripping up his back leg. Being sent backwards onto his head, he placed his hands on the ground and backflipped into a crouch for a leg sweep that Catwoman flipped away from herself, a grin still on her face.

"Let's see if you're still such a cream puff Maxie," Catwoman said, beckoning him forth with a crook of her finger, "Hopefully it doesn't take you forty-five minutes to so much as touch me this time."

The dirty-blond would-be criminal tensed his muscles in his crouch, preparing to leap right at her and begin, "It'll be more than a damn touch!"

XxX

(The Next Day)

"Mr. Gabriel, where did you get that black eye from?"

Max turned to his teacher after entering the classroom. For once the man actually noticed when he'd entered the room and picked up on the wicked bruise around his left eye. Certainly, everyone had seen it, but no one picked up on it. They just assumed he'd gotten mugged or something. It was Gotham City after all.

Thus, Max hadn't fashioned a very convincing excuse, "Accident at work?"

God, he needed better explanations. Every time he gave one, they sounded so slapdash and vague… mostly because they were. He really had to start thinking of decent ones to keep saved up, 'Because I'm not sure saying I got hurt groping the lady teaching me how to be a thief would be a good excuse.'

On the plus side, it only took him five minutes to get a hand on her that time, and it was a better spot than her wrist. Good enough to get punched over after the fact.

XxX

After all of the work, put in by both Max and Catwoman, the time finally came. Four weeks had passed, and Max wasn't going to ask Catwoman to bother with him any longer. She had her own things to do and he'd put her affairs on hold for long enough.

Also, he couldn't waste any more time. The clock was ticking and he needed to come up with something to keep his apartment.

"Well, you still have zero natural talent," Catwoman said, looking over Max's handiwork on her fake course, "But compared to how bad you were when I first met you, you're leaps and bounds better. I still don't think you should start in Gotham City, but if you've got nowhere else to go you've got nowhere else to go."

"I've been thinking about that," Max said, smiling despite the almost backhanded compliment he'd received. He knew by now that Catwoman was never going to admit that she liked him a bit, and that was fine. He owed her and she could talk to him any way she wanted to, "I've come up with a plan."

"You already know what you want to hit?"

"Well… no. But after I do, and I start taking stuff, I know how I'm gonna handle things."

Ambitious wasn't he, to think he'd already set up how he was going to operate? So he had a set of rules for himself already. Well it was better to get one sooner rather than later. It kept you from getting into too much hot water when you were young and dumb, which in Catwoman's opinion, Max was.

Rule number one, don't kill cops or capes. That was just day one stuff. Using extreme force like that wouldn't solve any problems, it would just make sure that the next one that came after him had a vested interest in making sure he bit the dust.

Rule number two. Never fight when you can run, and never surrender when you can fight. Screw your pride. Money is on the line.

Rule number three. No haul is worth your life or your freedom. Max was stealing to make his life better. Getting thrown into prison trying to get the big score was not part of the plan.

Rule number four. Never stay active enough in a given area to establish a pattern. Justice League members or not, heroes tended to be territorial when the issue wasn't on a world-threatening level. The less heroes that looked his way at any given time, the better. Hopefully by the time he got the money he needed, few heroes would barely know that he'd been active at all. That was the idea at least.

Rule number five, which was really just an extension and an addendum to rule number four.

NO METROPOLIS! EVER!

He wasn't even going to make the assumption that Superman had better things to worry about than dealing with some paltry burglaries when there was Justice League work and big time bad guys out there that could actually hurt him and the city, because the man was damn near omniscient. Superman would probably wind up busting him in passing without even giving it a second thought.

He had to be cautious.

It wasn't like he would be doing this every day either. Just once in a while. Plenty of time to let any heat against his masked side die down. After all, it was Gotham City. If you waited long enough there would be another bad thing to overshadow the last bad thing that had happened.

Catwoman heard him out and figured that his code was pretty threadbare and didn't cover even half of what he would really need to be successful, but as long as he stuck to it religiously it would save him some headaches down the line. That was if he actually managed to last long enough to make any noise out there.

Either way, whether he did or didn't wasn't her problem. She'd done her part, "Well Maxie, it looks like you graduate. Hooray," Sparing him a wave, she prepared to head home and plan her own burglary, "See you around kid," She'd spent enough time babysitting.

He was going to be on his own again. No safety net or security blanket in Selina, as prickly and as fickle as she could be from time to time. It was time to stand on his own or simply fall down.

"Hey Selina," Max said before she could leave him alone on the rooftop. She turned and shot him a baleful look for using her real name, but he didn't care. He just had to know, "Why'd you help me out?"

Selina pulled up her goggles and looked right at Max, getting the exact same feeling that she'd gotten the day they'd met, just before she was about to take a cab and ditch him, "I'm not even sure I know. Maybe I'm just a sucker for a kid willing to try and take on the big, bad city all by his lonesome."

Maybe it could have been because she understood someone feeling the desire to take what they wanted to give themselves a better life.

A smile came to Max's face. At least someone cared, if only just a little bit. After his 'trainer' left, he pulled off his hat and raked his hand through his hair before blowing a kiss in her direction. He was going to be a criminal but a deal was a deal. His word had to mean something, otherwise he had nothing at all.

He wouldn't ever bother her again. His problems didn't affect her, and after everything else it would have been grossly unfair to try and offload onto her more than he already had. It was only a month of instruction, but Selina had done more than he could have asked.

The training wheels were off now, and it was time to see if he could actually make a go of it.

XxX

When Batman was away, the criminal underbelly of Gotham City didn't sleep. Fortunately there were two more caped crusaders willing and able to step in when the big man was off on world saving business.

Ironically however, since most of Gotham's criminal powerhouses had a pathological grudge against Batman, a lot of them kept a significantly lower profile when he wasn't around to try and take a piece out of. Most of their schemes revolved around somehow getting rid of Batman, so when he wasn't around, the things they stole or the people they went after didn't really have a lot of purpose.

Robin enjoyed it though. It gave him free reign to try his hand and keeping the city safe without having to worry as much about as many of the freaks and baddies coming out to play.

On nights without threats aimed at the very heart of Gotham City itself, keeping an eye out for thieves and other street crimes was the main priority.

And speaking of which, there had been a bit of a security snafu at Gotham Arena. Radio reports said that it was just an alarm error, but there was no such thing when it came to that town. With that in mind, Robin made his way out to check out the scene.

"No way," Robin said after realizing what had been taken, and right from the home locker room to boot, "Aw, I haven't seen _that_ before," And he meant it.

Game jerseys had been taken from the Gotham Knights basketball team. Actual game jerseys used on the court earlier that night in a televised game. He could actually get a good piece of action from selling those. If he could confirm that they were authentic game jerseys, which wasn't hard to do, he could pull down tens of thousands of dollars.

It was definitely the m.o. of the newest pest criminal in the Gotham area.

Wasting no time, Robin activated his communicator and spoke to the person on the other end, "Batgirl, I'm at Gotham Arena looking at a break-in. This is totally that new guy," He said, barely hiding his anticipation, "You want to see him?"

"_The new guy? He's small-time isn't he? He never steals anything worth any real money,"_ From the sound of Batgirl's voice, Robin was well aware that she didn't know what he was excited about.

"Yeah, but we've never even seen him before. Most small-time guys we come across, we still know who they are," The new guy, all anyone knew was that he wore a hood. That wasn't much of a description, "Don't you want some new business to bring up to Batman when he gets back? No real noise ever goes off when he's gone doing the Justice League thing anyway."

Silence reigned between them for a moment, and Robin knew that he had her attention, _"…I'll be there in a minute."_

"I'll try and get on his tail now," Robin said, rushing outside and grappling up to the roof to try and get a bird's eye view of the area. If he were a bad guy, how would he get away without setting off the good guys? Rooftops were meant for traveling fast, not under the radar.

Alleyways it was then.

Figuring that the perp would want to get himself lost heading downtown where things got clustered before trying to make his return to wherever he was based out of, Robin started combing the backstreets and eventually spotted a quick figure darting across a road out of range of the glowing streetlights, 'There's my man.'

Making sure his grappling hook was anchored, Robin swung down into the alley, set to get the drop on his adversary with a kick to the back of the head. He didn't expect his quarry to roll at the last second and avoid the attack altogether.

Robin landed on the ground in a short slide and watched a hooded figure literally crawl up a wall, with slight hints of blue electricity stemming from his fingers and feet. Well that was fine. He'd normally prefer a quick resolution, but that really would have been disappointing after having the guy duck him for almost two months.

A second shot of the grapple gun sent Robin up and onto the rooftop, landing in front of his target and bringing him to a stop amid building ventilation pipes and systems, "Wait, that's not a hood. That's like a scarf or something."

"Or something," The figure said. Wrapped around his head was a loose looking, thick dark wrap that went around his neck over his shoulders, upper chest, and upper back. It covered his head as if it actually were a loose hood, keeping his eyes and most of his upper face shadowed in the dark. He wore fingerless gloves on his hands and black boots on his feet that went up to his shins. At his waist he wore a pair of brown straps forming an 'x' around his hips with a few utility holsters attached on both his left and right sides.

The porous green suit that most of his outfit consisted of seemed to provide protection that rivaled the suits that Batman and his wards wore, at least as far as blunt damage went. There didn't seem to be any kind of plating or armor to it otherwise.

Robin squared off with him, but noticed that he looked closer to a teenager than to an adult. He didn't look any older than he did to be honest, "You're the new bad guy in town? I'd say you look a little young, but that'd make me a hypocrite wouldn't it?"

"Dude, I don't want to hear that out of you," Max said, gesturing at Robin, offended at what he was implying when it came to surprise at his age, "I know there are definitely people out there younger than me that'd make me piss my pants."

Robin opened his mouth to respond his new enemy but shut his mouth, because he was more correct than he probably even knew. So if he was that self-aware, why was he out there doing what he was doing? "Who are you supposed to be anyway?"

Whatever Batman's chief apprentice had been expecting, what he wound up getting wasn't it.

Max actually took a moment to think about it, "I… never really came up with anything," He said more to himself than to Robin, "…I didn't plan on introducing myself to anybody. But I guess seven weeks is a good enough streak without running into one of you."

Without another second of pleasantries, Max turned and ran but Robin quickly hurled a Bird-a-rang at his retreating back.

Max turned his head just long enough to see it coming and dove through the thin opening between two pipes to avoid it, "Yeah! That was awesome! How about that?" He gloated, impressed by his own move.

Clicking his tongue, Robin went straight over with a single flip, landing just after Max safety rolled through his straight dive. Max's eyes went wide and tried to lean his head out of the way of a punch thrown at him. Grabbing the offending limb by the forearm at his shoulder, Max turned in the direction of the punch and tried to back elbow Robin only to find it blocked.

Robin kicked at the back of Max's knee, bringing him down to one foot on the ground. Max leaned forward and took all of Robin's body weight with him, throwing him forward in an improvised leverage toss. Both of them quickly scrambled back to their feet and faced off again, "Give up or start crying. The choice is yours."

Robin's punch hadn't missed at all. Max's lip was split and bleeding. Fortunately the suit had heightened his reaction so well he'd been able to turn his head with the punch and somewhat turn the tide to a neutral tilt.

'He hit me in the suit. He hit me good too,' Max thought to himself, thinking that maybe stopping to fight wasn't such a great idea. A touch of fear began to creep up his throat. Without the suit he'd have been a goner already, 'No wonder Selina thought he'd tear me apart even with the training.'

As he thought about what rotten luck it must have taken to finally get one of Batman's partners on his case, he saw a smirk form on Robin's face, and for the life of him, Max couldn't comprehend why. Robin hadn't beaten him up that badly yet, had he?

A small nagging feeling at the back of his neck for some reason told Max that it was in his vested best interest to move as hard and as fast as he could by any means necessary. He jumped as high as he could in the air and tried to gracefully backflip and land back on his feet but failed, almost taking a spill onto his face had he not caught himself with his arms.

He managed to salvage the landing onto all-fours and narrowly jump over a bola that had been thrown at him from a blind spot. With a quick turn of his head, he cursed his luck. When it rained it poured.

Batgirl. The yellow bat symbol on the chest of the dark, skin-tight protective outfit was a dead giveaway as to who she aligned herself with if it hadn't been obvious at first. Her gloves, utility belt, and boots were yellow and long red hair trailed down her back from underneath her cowl.

The dark princess of the night spared Max a glance and looked up at Robin, "Is this the guy?" She asked her fellow sidekick, getting a nod out of him, "You didn't beat him yet?"

"He's got funky moves," Robin defended, "If it makes up for it, he hasn't really hit me once."

"Give me a few more tries buddy. I'm just getting warmed up," Max stood back up and tried to position himself in a triangle formation with the two instead of an ill-advised pincer setup that would have spelled disaster for him, "What? You called for backup?"

"He called me before he even found you," Batgirl corrected him, hands on her hips as she tried to size him up. He was obviously their age, "I didn't think I'd get here before he beat you though, whoever you are."

Well that was fair. After tangling with the likes of say, Solomon Grundy, putting the boots to a rookie thief probably should have seemed like child's play on the surface.

But again, the name thing came up, and if he didn't name himself they'd come up with one for him, and those tended to be quite awful. Max was pretty sure the Penguin didn't name himself, and at this rate someone was going to saddle him with a terrible moniker. With the poor way he was fighting tonight though, he might as well have been called a zero.

"You know what," Max finally said acerbically, "Just call me 'Null'. As in, everything I've tried tonight to stay the hell away from you two has been totally worthless."

…If he was going to have a name that reflected how much he sucked, he was at least going to be the one to give it to himself.

Batgirl actually laughed at the newly named Null's honesty assessment of his own situation. Well stealth had somehow failed, and he didn't seem very enthused to be there at all, so perhaps reasoning him down was an option, "You could just give up you know. It'd probably be a lot better off for you."

When faced with a rather gentle offer to call it quits, coupled with a gentle smile from a girl he could almost guarantee was pretty behind her mask, Null considered if it was too late to go back.

Yes, it was. The cops might not have known who Null was, but Robin and Batgirl did. If they caught him and pinned even just the theft he'd committed tonight on him, the game was over and his life was ruined. Even if he would only wind up going for a few years, that would be enough to ruin any future he had.

To give up so easily when faced with his first real bit of criminal adversity, he would have been going back on a promise he'd made to himself to give it everything he had to make this work.

The last resort, as it was.

"I'm sorrier about it than you think I am," Null eventually said, putting his hands back up, prepared to fight or flee again, "No excuses though."

He was either getting away or he was going to prison.

This was officially the dumbest idea he'd ever come up with in his sixteen years of life on Earth.

A stutter-step forward put Batgirl and Robin on the defensive, allowing Null to turn tail and take a standing jump, clearing an entire street to land on another rooftop and try to run.

The sound of a gun going off gave way to the end of a grappling line stabbing into a water tower in front of Null as he ran. Turning around to see just how close his pursuers were, it gave him the time to cover up and block a pair of Batgirl's feet from being driven into his body.

Null was knocked to the roof by the kick, but he managed to push Batgirl off of him and roll back to his feet in a single move. Upon standing he had to knock away a punch from Robin before retaliating with a side kick that hit nothing but air.

'Gotta get him down,' Null thought to himself, pursuing Robin in the hopes of landing a strike good enough to take him down. Stopping in his pursuit upon feeling a presence darting at him from out of his sight, he spun around with a wheel kick that Batgirl ducked by the points of the bat ears on her mask.

"Can he sense us move?" Batgirl asked, standing with Robin after avoiding Null's blind kick. She knew she'd been dead silent in her approach. Only Batman himself would have been savvy enough to know that she had been approaching, and the newly christened concealed crook didn't catch her as being that perceptive.

Robin shook his head, not knowing how to answer. Null had done the same thing to him when he'd first found him, and he'd been moving even faster than Batgirl had been at the time, "I don't see how, but otherwise I couldn't tell you what it could be. He knows _something_ we don't."

But he seemed unsure in the way he moved when he fought. Null had a few slick moves, but Robin was a top-level martial artist. Just from dealing with him, he could tell that Null wasn't quite sure if he was using his techniques correctly. Even if he could sense danger, he didn't have the talent to actually do anything about much of it.

Locking eyes with Batgirl, Robin moved in tandem with her right at Null. Whatever chance he had before to make a decent account of himself was quickly dashed.

For every punch or kick he managed to block, three or four landed on him regardless. Even rolling with the blows the way he'd been taught did nothing when he wound up turning his head or body right into the path of a hit from another assailant.

Null had lost count of how many times he'd been hit and wound up reaching out for anything to grab just to keep from falling backwards. What he wound up grabbing was Batgirl's cape over her shoulder immediately after taking a punch from her. Thinking he'd been playing possum to a degree she turned and threw Null as hard as she could, sending him sprawling across the remainder of the roof until he dropped off of the edge.

Batgirl's jaw dropped and was quickly followed by the sound of a crash over the side of the building, "Oh no."

Robin winced at the sound and hoped that they hadn't killed a thief by accident while trying to bring him down. That was way too far for things to have been taken, "…Damn. I guess you got him," Unacceptably far, especially just for a teenager that had been stealing, and not even anything dangerous or important, "We've gotta go check."

Nodding in agreement, Batgirl dropped down to survey the scene.

Only to find nothing.

No trace of anything. No body, dead or otherwise. Nothing.

It didn't make any sense.

"Okay, he might be badder than we thought he was," Robin said, staring at the complete lack of anything resembling Null in the alley, "He's gone?"

Batgirl knew she'd heard metal smash and saw a massive dent in the hood of a nearby abandoned car.

"Wow. He must have landed on his feet and made a run for it," She tried to deduce. From how he'd dodged her bolas, how he'd jumped an entire street just from a standing position while turning around, and other things he'd done he had great athleticism, and from how he'd dodged and reacted to a good number of their moves he had smashing reflexes, "He was pretty fast so he probably got a good jump on us."

Activating the lenses in her cowl, they changed to analyzing goggles, but that bore no fruit for her. Not even any footprints to tell them which way he might have gone. No blood, nothing.

Where did that sort of showing come from? He barely seemed like he knew what he was doing at first and then he lost them in a heartbeat.

If Batman found out they lost a bad guy, he was going to kick their asses when he got back.

Hoping to pick up Null's trail as he couldn't have gotten too far, both Robin and Batgirl left the scene to try and see if they could find him in the midst of his fleeing. He'd been heading downtown at first, so maybe they could blanket the possible paths he could take and cut him off.

And they left the still and quiet, cold alleyway, with only the sound of distant vehicles and city noise echoing into the passage.

In the dark, with the soft sound of scratching on the concrete, what looked at first glance to be just a form-fitting parchment of the pavement began to move slowly.

It had taken everything Null had to remain perfectly still and silent. Tears pricked at his eyes the entire time, but he had no other choice. Playing dead and relying on a facet of his parents' suit had been his only choice.

Adaptable camouflage. His suit could change to any color and visual texture he wanted to. Even the temperature of the suit would adapt automatically if he pressed himself against enough of something for long enough. Why his parents had kept this for as long as they had without selling it to someone, Null would never know. The military probably would have paid them enough to keep them set for life if they'd managed to get it to them.

But it wasn't his primary concern at the moment. His main concern was the awful landing he'd just taken courtesy of the Batman Family of superheroes. His entire right side screamed at him to both turn over onto his left side and stay perfectly still at the same time, "Urrgggh…"

Null slowly crawled on the ground after figuring that Robin and Batgirl were gone, but he soon wished he hadn't. Lying motionless on the cold ground had been so comfortable compared to even so much as moving a muscle. He couldn't have hit the hood of that car any harder if Batgirl had actually been trying to throw him off of that roof.

"Yeah, I jumped off of the car and ran for it alright," Null grunted out sarcastically, mocking Batgirl's overestimation of his capabilities, "Give me a break. What do I look like here?"

As bad as it made him feel, he had to stand, had to get up. He couldn't stay on the ground. Gotham City was the absolute last place on the planet anyone wanted to find themselves injured in an alley. He had to at least try and get home and get himself some help. Getting up was slow going, but when he did he found a silver lining; nothing was broken, even if everything hurt.

He'd kept his small haul, and at least for the time being, he was free of caped crusaders.

But it stuck in his head just how close he'd come to losing it all on his very first brush with Gotham's finest. If it had been Batman, no suit camouflage would have saved his ass. He wouldn't have even been able to push the issue far enough to luck into the circumstance to use it.

…Because that was what it had been. Dumb luck. Pure dumb luck had gotten him out of trouble on that night

Null thanked God he was only in this for the short term. If he had to deal with this sort of thing for the rest of his life, it would have been enough to bring him to his knees.

* * *

**This is just an experiment.**

**I've thought about doing this for a while, and I finally decided to give it a go.**

**Every hero or villain has a reason to become and remain a hero or a villain, or at least they try to come up with a concrete one in their own mind. DC Superheroes are pretty straight-up like that. I wanted to try and introduce a character that doesn't want any part of the encompassing good versus evil, superpowered, aliens attacking things that you get with comics.**

**Null is a thief, or at least that's all he wants to be, but he doesn't want to be some sort of soulless person that won't do something when he knows he can. Granted, there isn't much he can actually do to even protect himself or ensure his own interests at the moment, but that will change. He doesn't have any compulsion to rob or fight for some higher aim. His sense of right and wrong isn't supposed to be above his own sense of self-preservation, and as of now he's very 'me first'. There's no reason for him not to be.**

******He isn't twisted enough to be a proper villain, and his sense of justice isn't strong enough for him to martyr himself as a hero. He's as close to a normal person as I think I can muster.**

**His primary delusion and main fatal flaw is that he thinks that when he's had enough, he can get himself out. No matter how deep he gets, just as long as he never gets busted or unmasked. He has to think so. It's the only reason he accepted the idea of becoming a thief in the first place.**

**Well… that and he barely knows anything about his own suit other than what it does for him… and his bare-bones combat training that he is now painfully aware isn't enough.**

**It's supposed to be the closest example I think I can give of what a somewhat normal person without great resources or circumstances of origin would do if they were repeatedly forced into the outrageous world of heroes and villains.**

**Eventually if all goes to plan, it will expand into the greater DC Universe.**

**Like I said, just an experiment really.**

**So long for now. Kenchi out.**


	2. Almost Easy

Disclaimer: I do not own DC. If only I had some Lex Luthor-esque plot/scheme to take it from right under their noses. But then again, if I were capable of that, why would I stop at just DC?

Why not the world?

**Chapter 2: Almost Easy**

* * *

Entering his apartment in the early morning, Max dropped his workout bag on the floor by the door and locked it behind him. The local gym wasn't the most technical place to get faster and stronger, but he wasn't expecting a space-age set-up. He didn't really need it either.

A 225 bench wasn't twice his body weight, but in his opinion it wasn't too shabby either, and a 300 pound squat worked for him for the time being. He didn't figure he'd be able to ever lift that much in any capacity, even if squatting let you pick up more than he otherwise could.

In the weeks after his encounter with Robin and Batgirl he hadn't tried to take anything, only to prepare as best as he could for the next time out where he'd give things another try. He wasn't in another hurry to get his butt kicked all over town and he didn't have a need to take the risk yet either.

There was no need to take anything else any time soon. There was a market for authentic sports memorabilia, and the Gotham Knights were in the middle of their best season in twenty years. He hadn't even had to leave town to find someone willing to buy those right up from him on the internet.

Worrying about rent, worrying about food and keeping the lights on was a thing of the past, for now at least.

But it would come up again, and come up soon. And he wasn't looking to keep stealing for subsistence. Max wanted enough money stockpiled to actually take a chance on having a normal life. Maybe he could find some sort of dream to chase? With enough money, even if he failed it wouldn't lead to many negative consequences. At least that was the idea.

Flicking on the lights in his bathroom, Max looked over the large ugly bruise covering the right side of his torso under his arm. It hadn't stopped him from going to the gym though. Robin and Batgirl had handed him his ass the month before. He'd kept up training, but not to a degree of trying to improve.

They didn't have suits that boosted their abilities and they were still stronger, faster, and more skilled than he'd ever dream to be. But they managed to do it. If he was going to run into them again he _had_ to find some way to close the gap. Using the suit in of itself as a crutch wasn't a good plan.

It was an awesome suit, but it was only as good as the guy inside of it was. Who cared if the suit made him twice as strong or however strong it made him if he could barely lift his own body weight over his head? Who cared if the suit made him faster if he couldn't even run a 4.5 forty-yard time? And none of that mattered at all in combat if he didn't even have a feel for fighting in the first place.

All he could do was work on it and get himself some field practice.

Said field practice put a grin on his face. There was more to it than just getting into spars with safety equipment on at that gym he paid to go to.

There were tons of people to test himself with for real. Gotham City had lots of criminals spoiling for a fight to prove they were tough or bad. Even hurt, he could take down a thug thinking that a kid who scuffed his shoe needed to be taught some respect. It was so easy to start a fight in that town, it made Max wonder if there was something in the air or the water that brought out the dark side in people.

Probably him too, since he was knowingly provoking these encounters even by playing dumb.

He hated lifting, he hated stamina exercises, but as it turned out he loved fighting with his hands, or at least learning how to fight with them. The differences the slightest placement or differing motion of one's body could present to an attack was enrapturing. And actually finding out from fighting that if things he'd learned were working was addictive.

It definitely helped him learn more about the suit, as he'd just throw it on underneath some clothes whenever he wanted some field practice. Apparently when he hit someone it would actually stun them, and not just from the impact. A blow from him was augmented with weak stun-gun properties. It was the best way he could describe it to himself.

Once again though, it didn't make any sense. None of it did. There were no sources of power built into the suit to let it achieve its processes.

"Mom and Dad's suit," Max said to himself, observing the outfit that had helped him more than he could ever give credit to. Even as he held a large ice pack to his ribs, "What did you make this for?" What he wouldn't have given for some sort of instruction manual.

Or any kind of idea as to how it worked would have been just fine too. As far as he knew, he just put it on, and he became better than himself. Faster, stronger, more agile… he even felt smarter.

And that made him realize that not knowing what made his equipment tick was a very unadvised course of action. For all he knew it could fail on him at the worst possible time.

Whatever. He didn't plan on being Null again anytime soon. There wasn't any use worrying about it now. The answer was probably somewhere in the house mixed in with all of the stuff that his parents had scribbled up or saved on a hard drive.

As of right then, school beckoned.

XxX

The good thing about finding oneself estranged from the students at one's school, no one really cared enough to question if anything was wrong when you walked around with a bit of a limp.

Oh, Mika. He hadn't had a relevant conversation with that guy in a while. Wow. He didn't even remember the guy's last name. That was either pathetic or scary.

"Quinn might have made a mistake man," Mika said, leaning against the desk with a grin, "…Keeping her party open like that. That's trouble. You're going this time?"

Of course he was going. It was the sort of thing he'd been fighting for the ability to actually go and do after all. He wasn't going to spend a Saturday night working his tail off while something cool was going on for once. He was just surprised that he'd kept enough casual acquaintances to warrant an invite to a party for once.

Max couldn't wipe the grin off of his face, leaning forward and setting his chin on his arms folded on his desk. It was too far to bend without feeling the strain on his damaged frame, causing him to wince and sit up as if he were burned.

"You alright?"

Max was hardly able to cover for his little jolt of movement easily enough behind a laugh, "Yeah, it's just good to have the weekend off for once."

Being a thief had turned out to be a good idea, painstaking lengths he had to go to in order to get the job done aside. The work was harder and vastly more perilous, but at least it didn't take up all of his waking moments. He could actually have a life again.

For once, Max remained wide awake all day in all of his classes. It felt good to be up for once in life again.

XxX

(Later That Afternoon - Batcave)

With a yawn, Barbara rubbed her eyes and closed her schoolbook, having finished her homework. In the time it took for night to fall and patrols to start, all you really had to do was stay on the lookout for the bigger happenings. That left plenty of time to see to mundane day-to-day activities, like school assignments.

Bruce was out and Tim was on his way back from school even then, leaving her alone manning the watch of the city in the meantime.

Well, not as alone as she could have been.

"Kara, Bruce is going to kick your ass if he finds you in here," Barbara said, feeling another presence hovering around out of her sight. Despite the content of her words, her tone was light as she smiled, "…Super or not."

Floating in front of her line of sight, an upside-down teenage girl with long blonde hair and bright blue eyes lowered herself. She wore a blue miniskirt with a yellow belt, and a blue skintight long-sleeved shirt high enough to show most of her torso. On her back, a flowing red cape, and on her feet, high red boots. Most importantly, emblazoned across the chest of her shirt was a yellow shield containing a big red 'S', letting the world know who she was.

Superman's sole living relative, Kara Zor-El. Supergirl.

"What do you mean 'if'?" Supergirl said, righting herself in the air in front of Barbara, "He probably knows I'm here right now. Bruce knows everything. All the time."

"Which is why you should know he gets testy about people showing up uninvited."

"Cut me some slack," Supergirl said, hovering around the Batcave aimlessly while Barbara kept watch on all of the surveillance screens, "…I'm bored. So what's new in your neck of the woods?"

The redhead shrugged her shoulders and spun around in her chair to speak to her fellow teenage superhero, "Nothing much really. It's been quiet lately if you can believe it or not," Comparatively anyway, "As quiet as Gotham gets at least."

It was obviously not the answer Supergirl had been looking for. Clark was so overprotective of her, she usually had to leave the bigger baddies to him. Actually, when he found out she was in Gotham City he'd still more than likely chew her out. The man wasn't quick to anger, but when it came to family he was rather stern.

The Man of Steel wasn't exactly fond of Batman's chief stomping grounds either. It was a nasty place to be.

Supergirl sighed and landed on the floor behind the command center, taking a novel look around the vast hideout of Batman and his vigilante associates, "You know that Gotham on its quietest day is still more interesting than Smallville most of the time. Come on. I flew all the way out here. Fill me in would you?"

Barbara rolled her eyes at the way her Kryptonian friend almost seemed to plead for some entertaining story, "Nothing big, like I said. The only thing new is a new thief making the rounds."

"There, that's something. Talk about that. A new one you say?" Supergirl asked, "Are you sure it's not just another criminal from somewhere else?"

"Yep," Barbara said, "Tim and I fought him first. He didn't even have a name for himself until we ran into him. He calls himself Null."

Supergirl raised an eyebrow at the name. It definitely wasn't the most imposing name, but it was nothing if not simple. There was something easy to remember about it, "So if he got away from you and Tim he's got to be some kind of tough, right?"

Quite the contrary.

"Null's totally small time," Barbara said, "He never goes after anything big. He steals things big enough that he'll get paid off of them, but not something so big that it makes Batman take notice, so he tells us it's our problem."

"He wants you to catch him?" It was enough to draw a grin from Supergirl, "What, like a test or something?"

"Null's not worth his time really," Barbara said before grinning, "Tim doesn't like him at all because it's hard to find him. Null steals the weirdest stuff, so it's hard to tell if it's him behind something," Barbara said with a shake of her head, "Apparently, it's always worth good money though."

Supergirl furrowed her brow in thought over the matter. He was brazen enough to try and steal and he'd gotten away from both Batgirl and Robin before. There was obviously _something_ there worth talking about, "He's got to be sort of good, right? He took you guys on."

"Well… that's the thing. He's not that good."

"Then how haven't you caught him yet?"

Barbara chewed on her lip, wondering how to word things. He was odd,

"He might be a metahuman. His reflexes are better than ours, and he's flat-out faster. I've even seen him stick to walls with just his hands and feet," She admitted aloud, "And he's not a genius, but he's no idiot. He at least tries to pick his spots," At that she gestured to Supergirl, "Like right now. Everyone probably knows you're in town, so he's definitely not going to try a thing until he knows you're long gone."

He didn't like fighting with heroes period. There was no chance in hell he was going to test his luck against Superman's cousin. No chance of running away _and_ no chance of winning a fistfight? Null was going to keep his head in his hole until that little bit of trouble passed overhead back out to the Midwest.

Supergirl smirked and laughed a bit, "That's a shame. Gotham City doesn't have many bad guys that aren't old enough to be tried as adults. I kind of wanted to see what one looked like."

And what one acted like. From the sounds of things, he wasn't some kind of detestable crook.

That wasn't the usual fare that one came across in Gotham. Even if he wasn't particularly a threat, normally named criminals of any sort didn't get any sort of favorable retelling after the fact from Barbara. Whoever this Null person was, he obviously didn't upset her too badly during their run-in. He actually seemed in over his head.

"Wait, what he looks like? You can't even see his face under his hood thing," Barbara belatedly pointed out before being met with a cheeky smirk, causing her to remember who she was talking to, "Oh. Nevermind."

XxX

(Elsewhere in Gotham City – East End)

An old cash advance had come to the attention of a low-level loan shark working for one of the last remaining old-family mobs left in Gotham. A scowl crossed his face as he looked it over for the tenth time that day.

Two scientists had signed off on a moderate cash loan with his family after they couldn't get one through legal methods from the bank. They seemed to know what they were talking about, and from the sound of their pitch they seemed to have their shit together. They'd showed past credentials with S.T.A.R Labs and other assorted research and development companies, and had guaranteed when they'd finished constructing the idea they had needed the loan to finance, they would quickly repay.

They hadn't seemed to be desperate people. Just very confident that as long as they paid, and they were self-assured that they would have what they needed to pay, there was nothing negative that could befall them. That had been well over a year ago though.

Yes, their time had long since come up, and not a peep out of them. It was time to collect, one way or another.

"Alright, this loan's been pending for fourteen goddamn months," The lender said before lacing his fingers together in front of him on his desk, "Deadbeats. So I asked Boss Galante to send you. The boss says you wasn't doin' nothin', was you Zeiss?"

"Yeah, yeah," A man of average height, Zeiss wore a black suit and red tie, along with a smart black jacket over his clothing. He had slick black hair on the top of his head and wore a pair of high-tech goggles over his eyes, "…Wastin' my time with a stupid collection."

He had to work for his pay like anyone else though, and Pasquale Galante paid well.

"Hey, with the money these folks owe, it's worth it," The loan broker said, holding up a piece of paper before ripping it up, "You ain't doin' it alone neither."

Zeiss sucked his teeth and gave the man a look, "What do you mean I ain't doin' it alone? It's a collection. What the fuck do I need a partner for?"

"Oh, but it's not the kind of collection you're used to," A smooth voice said from the entrance of the office.

At the door, a man leaned against the frame sporting a tall, slender frame, and unique attire. Cloaked in the black robes of old-time tax collectors, he wore a top hat half of his height and a small black mask that covered the upper portion of his face. His hair was wild and shockingly white, and his white teeth were on full display in a wide, maniacal grin.

Zeiss's eyebrows rose up above his goggles as he finally understood why he was going, "Oh, so it's _that_ kind of collection," The kind of collection where there wouldn't be any collecting.

"I'm afraid the subjects of your loan are no longer amongst the living,"

"You killed 'em already?" The loan shark said, "I called for you like an hour ago. That was fast."

The tall man laughed wickedly, shaking his head as he held his hat on top of his head, "No-no-no, they've been dead. Roy and Lena Gabriel. Died less than a year apart, the last one passing over six months ago. Did you know that Roy moved out of their home some time shortly after his wife's death?"

So why did he seem so pleased? That just meant that he didn't have any targets to get rid of.

"Of course, that just means that their son will have to pay their debts instead."

It was understandable enough, but it still didn't explain why two people were needed to kill a kid. Zeiss had better things to do. Batman was still out there somewhere, and he wanted to prove he could take him down. Money talked though, so he kept a steady job. It was almost admirable, "One of us can do this, so pick one."

"It's a scientist's kid. Don't you read nothin'? Chances are, he's either smart as hell, or he's tough enough to give you the runaround," The mob moneylender said, "…I'm sending two just in case. Best case scenario, you get paid for watchin' a kid get shot. Worst case scenario, you have to break his legs so Tally Man can shoot him."

Well when he put it that way, how could he turn it down? It was easy money. The equivalent of otherwise going for a walk. Even if Zeiss didn't fancy himself a hitman, more of a bodyguard really, Tally Man was enough of a psycho where he'd jump into the endeavor merrily.

Looking between his boss's lower collector and Tally Man's grinning form, Zeiss shrugged his shoulders and strode for the exit, hands shoved into his pockets, "Fine. Let's hurry up and get this Gabriel kid,"

It wasn't like a kid would be that hard to find… or kill for that matter.

XxX

(With Max – Some Time Later)

It was odd how out of place Max felt upon entering the townhouse that hosted the party he'd looked forward to for days.

He knew a lot of the people there, or at least he did before he had to take on actual responsibility and lost the time to hang around anyone. It was all just an exercise to try and reconnect. People remembered him, so that was something. It was too bad that he had been out of the general loop for so long that he needed to find common ground with someone again.

Still, it wasn't his scene and he knew it. There was the obligatory ill-gotten alcoholic gains that he hadn't been surprised to find had been procured for the party, but he wasn't touching any of that. Drinking wasn't that novel of a concept to him.

What did interest him was that he managed to locate the shock of red hair belonging to his lab partner, "Barbara?" Max said, surprised to actually see her, "What are you doing here?" He hadn't figured a straight-A student to be much for the night scene.

Turning toward him upon hearing the sound of his voice, Barbara reacted in surprise at the sight of him, "Oh, you know. Why not, right?"

She was keeping up appearances as a regular teenager. In reality by the time eleven o'clock rolled around she'd be out of there and changed into her Batgirl gear to patrol. She'd actually been doing an earlier shift before ever even arriving there.

Max gave her a wry grin, crossing his arms over his chest, "You're Commissioner Gordon's kid, and you're at a party where kids are drinking," He said, gesturing his head in the direction of the people holding red cups, "Do you think I could get some money selling that story and some phone pictures to the tabloids?"

Barbara rolled her eyes at the playful threat, "Do it and I'm keeping your name off of our lab papers for the rest of the year."

"It wasn't fair that you felt like you had to in the first place. I'll be helping and doing my own work from now on, don't worry," Max said, feeling quite proud that he was accomplishing exactly what he'd set out to in the first place. This was it, as quaint as it was. He was enjoying himself at a party with a maybe-friend instead of busting his hump mopping floors and restocking shelves at a corner store past midnight.

Who knew that a few burglaries and a beatdown from Robin and Batgirl could change his stars so completely? Daresay, he was happier then than he had been when his parents had both been alive. They hadn't paid much attention to him anyway, and now he knew he was surviving and possibly even thriving off of his own efforts.

His luck was on point tonight. In fact, it was so good, Max felt that it wouldn't have been outside of his range at the moment to try chatting Barbara up. Why not? Sure, she was out of his league, but the way things were going lately, it wouldn't have been out of the realm of possibility to maybe get a date. The worst that could happen would be that she'd shoot him down and he'd no longer be batting a thousand.

"Anyway, I'm not gonna bother you anymore. I should probably get lost before your boyfriend comes over and kicks my teeth in for talking to you," He didn't know if she had a boyfriend or not, but the idea was that assuming that she did would be flattering, and that choosing to back off because of such a thought was respectful, "I've been lucky lately. I don't want to end it like that."

It didn't quite work the way he wanted it to, and he quickly realized that his half-assed vision of the way things were supposed to go had been severely off.

Barbara sent him a slightly dirty look "Max, I don't have a boyfriend," She said, sounding significantly underwhelmed by his attempt at game. She was far too busy for anything like that, and while she didn't want to follow Bruce's example on that front, he sort of had a point, as heroes didn't have very good or safe relationships. Being reminded of that wasn't exactly pleasant, "I don't even know where you would've heard that."

"Really? You don't? I definitely thought you would have," Max's voice came out in a nervous timbre. Something about her scowl put him off more than he figured it should have, "Ugh. Sorry Barb."

His apology was earnest in its intent. He thought she'd laugh at least. He didn't think she'd take offense, and more than anything else it killed his mood that he'd been acting like a gassed-up clown. Who the hell did he think he was, James Bond? Being smooth wasn't his thing. Hell, stealing was barely his thing.

It seemed as if she had to take a moment to thoroughly scan his face before her own expression softened. Maybe she was just that good at reading people? Or maybe he just looked pathetic enough for her to let him off. Man, women were not his thing at all.

The police commissioner's daughter eventually considered that she wasn't staring down a criminal, and Max Gabriel was not a detestable person. He was a few things; confusing being one of them, but he wasn't a loathsome sort, "It's okay. I guess it's partially my own stuff too."

"I didn't want to piss you off. Can I take you somewhere and make it up to you sometime?" He eventually asked, "I told you, I kind of already owe you in the first place for all of the lab stuff, and I did mean that. And now this just makes me feel worse."

She was too good to him normally for it to sit well that he'd offended her at a party.

As weird as it was, since Barbara was nothing more than his lab partner, he talked to her more than he talked to anyone else in his year or at school in general these days. It wasn't worth making her think he was a jerk just because he was feeling like high on life at the moment.

The gorgeous redhead pursed her lips and Max's jaw almost dropped as she seemed to be considering it.

'Someone shoot me now, this can't be happening,' The fortunate youth thought to himself. Barbara Gordon was earnestly thinking about taking him up on his offer. If someone told him that it was his last day on earth, he might not have been able to question it, 'My luck really _is_ turning itself around.'

The front door to the townhouse swung open and everything came to a sudden stop. Even the music shut off as everyone looked to the odd person that had chosen to intrude. It was quite obvious that he wasn't any sort of high school student, junior-year or otherwise.

Whether it was the fact that he stood taller than most high school basketball players, that he had wild white hair, or dressed from a time period a dozen generations back. Any answer could have been correct in that regard.

And the startlingly wide smile on his face that seemed to promise nothing but ill intent didn't do much for anyone's state of mind.

"A moment of your time…" The tall, creepy robed man said, "I'm looking for someone, and those in his building say he headed to this part of town for the evening," Everyone was dead silent, with rapt attention being paid to him, "The sooner I get your assistance on the matter, the sooner I'll be gone and you can return to whatever it was you were doing before. Easy, right?"

Max didn't even know he'd been slipping his way to the back wall until his back pressed flat against the surface. Perhaps it was time to make himself scarce?

When a creepy guy with a slasher/pedophile grin on his face crashed the party, it was time to leave.

"If you could just point out a Maximillian Gabriel for me, I'll be on my way."

Every eye in the house turned Max's way as if he were a giant neon sign that had just turned on. It wasn't quite as damning as the throwing of the Christians to the lions, but the part-time thief probably felt there was some sort of credence to that line of thinking, "…You guys all suck."

The point could not have been emphasized enough for his tastes, even if he possessed a big foam hand that was permanently affixed in flipping every last one of them all the bird.

"Ah, I think I have my target," The Tally Man said before a pair of handguns flew into his hands from his loose, long sleeves. He immediately opened fire with eleven shots at Max through the crowd as the young man darted back through the kitchen. Everyone hit the floor at the sight of the gun before the shooting even started and covered their heads, screaming as Tally Man passed through and gave chase, "Remember kids, sooner or later everybody has to pay the Tally Man! Some sooner than others."

Bursting through the back door, Max dodged all of the outdoor furniture in the backyard without skipping a beat, "Ten seconds. You jerks couldn't give me a fucking ten second head start?" He hadn't been looking for anyone to play the magnanimous hero, but someone could have at least unintentionally stalled the guy by asking why he wanted him.

He barely cleared the top of the brick gate before a shot from a powerful handgun blew apart the portion where his hand had been. If jets had been in Max's backside at that point, he probably couldn't have run through that back alley any faster.

Tally Man hopped the very same wall and caught sight of his prey making a turn at the end of the alley, "Come, come now boy! Running just makes things so much harder for you!" He reloaded one of the revolvers in his possession and kept on with his job.

The fact that he'd somehow missed the boy grated his nerves. He'd emptied both of his revolvers and hadn't hit his mark.

On the roof, Zeiss watched Max slip out of the back and jump the brick wall in the backyard, shaking his head at the sight of the boy trying to run, "Tch. Tally Man couldn't peg that kid inside of the house?" The sound of screams as partygoers spilled out onto the street to run for dear life

Shaking his head, he smirked and started jumping roofs to try and find a place to cut the boy off if Tally Man didn't pump him full of lead first.

From the street, Barbara spared a glance back at the townhouse and narrowed her eyes at the sight of Zeiss taking off in the direction Tally Man had chased Max off in. Luckily since everyone was heading for the hills, she wouldn't be missed when she slipped away and summoned the Batcycle for her gear.

It was just about time for Batgirl to go back on patrol anyway.

XxX

Max dug through his pockets as he ran through the back area of a small business section of the neighborhood, finally pulling out his house keys that had two small lockpicking tools attached to the keychain. The very first door he saw quickly found itself forcefully opened. Hopefully it had a silent alarm that would have cops swarming quickly, but he couldn't count on that working out.

Come on lucky streak. Give him a pawn shop. A place with guns and bullets on display behind pickable, locked cages or breakable glass display cases, "Come on easy to steal guns. Come on."

It was dark, but the moonlight from the open door showed him enough. It was a bust. From the overpowering smell of candles and incense and the sight of decorative wall hangings and paint in the back room just waiting to be put out on display he had stumbled into a home decoration store.

Well, the lucky streak was officially dead and buried, 'Hopefully I'm not next,' Max thought to himself, shutting the door behind him and moving out into the front of the store. His backpack had books and the folded-up form of his suit, 'So it's either run and hope I lose him, put on the suit and run, or put on the suit and fight him to make damn sure I lose him.'

The sound of the back door's lock being shot off made the decision for him.

"You really are a zero, boy," Tally Man said, his wide, frightening grin on his face as he slowly crept through the store, searching for Max, "Less than zero really. Your parents' little debt has put you behind the eight-ball before you could even do anything about it."

Max stayed silent and tried to stay away from his line of sight, moving aisle-to-aisle as he tried to keep track of the gunman's movements. He was so tall, and with his hat Max could see him over the tops of the shelves.

From the pitch of the killer's voice, he was heading in the wrong direction anyway. It was the realest version of cat and mouse Max had ever played. Tally Man had already checked behind the counter, so that gave him some time to do what he needed to do if he could just quietly slip back there for a moment. He'd already taken off his shoes and belt to prevent noise, and had his backpack off of his shoulders ready to be opened.

The moment he saw Tally Man's silhouette enter another aisle with things that he could see through, he kept himself low and sprinted down his own aisle, hooking a right at the end of it and sliding behind the counter where he quickly relieved himself of his clothes and slipped into the inactive version of the suit.

Silence was golden, and he'd been taught how to do things without making sounds.

The moment he fastened the suit on tight and felt the familiar static current of it connecting to his body, he almost let out a sigh of relief. If he ever saw Selina again, he was going to kiss that woman, even if it got him beaten to a bloody pulp afterwards.

"It's a shame really, but I'm merely here to collect on what is owed," Tally Man continued, hoping to spook Max out of hiding. People were so jumpy when you threatened them and waved a loaded firearm at them. Go figure, "I'll make it quick if you stop running away. If you don't I'll kneecap you just to make you hold still."

Done suiting up, Null covered his head with his wrap and made his move to sidetrack Tally Man's attention away from his schoolkid alter-ego.

"You and those pea-shooters are making a lot of noise," He said, knowing he was getting the attention of a killer, "I thought you were a cop until I heard you speak up."

That was all it took for Tally Man to drift to the end of an aisle where he found himself staring down some odd young man in a suit with his head loosely covered, "You," He had no idea who the youth was, but knew that he had no business there, "What are you doing here?"

Once again, with his great big idea to get his enemy's notice, Null hadn't thought of a snappy response or logical explanation for his actions and reasoning before making his move. His banter would suffer because of it.

"Uh…" Well, Null was a thief, and they were in a store... of antiques. Two-plus-two equaled-, "I was totally robbing this place before I heard someone, not gonna point any fingers to who, start some soliloquy about useless children and how you should pay your debts. What are _you_ doing here?"

"I can show you what I'm doing here if you'd like," Tally Man had no problems killing whoever he felt like, especially if they were slowing him down.

Null scoffed and verbally derided him in return, "You can go kick rocks 'Donkey Teeth', I was here first," Null said with a snap to his tone, "Go play with little boys on someone else's score. I'm working right now."

Tally Man stared Null down for several seconds before humming to himself in thought, "Hm. Well, I guess this would be faster than talking," The second put his pistols away and pulled out a fully automatic G18 to take aim, Null had already darted off into another aisle before gunfire could rattle out through the storefront, "You owe the Tally Man for his time."

"Holy shit, it's Quaker Oats meets Boondock Saints in this motherfucker," Null said, ducking into an aisle of mirrors that he used to confound Tally Man. His spray of bullets hit nothing but reflective glass and frames, confusing him when there was no more smartmouth burglar to pump full of holes.

Things went quiet other than the sound of broken glass and porcelain crunching beneath Tally Man's feet as he slowly wandered through the store looking for someone to kill. He was after the Gabriel boy, but if he could murder that punk thief first he would have felt so much better first.

The glass on the floor alerted him when Null dropped down behind him looking to put him out. Turning abruptly, grinning maniacally as he did, the barrel of his gun wound up being aimed right in Null's face.

*BANG!*

Null turned sideways just enough to avoid getting his brains splattered on the tile floor beneath him. The bullet passed through the open space between his face and his hood comprised of wraps, but left him unscathed.

Grabbing Tally Man's wrist with his opposite hand, he slid his feet across the floor and dropped a heavy backfist strike to his torso that sent him into the nearby shelves, taking down the entire row and everything that had previously stood behind it.

His face underneath his hood was affixed in an expression of fright. One misstep in movement and he'd been a split-second away from certain death. He couldn't block a bullet with his skull, or anything else for that matter.

Tally Man rose back up from the several overturned shelves with an angered sneer on his face, "Someone wants to be a hero, don't they?" Without waiting for a response, he pulled out a submachine gun and opened fire.

XxX

Even blocks away, Zeiss could hear the shooting that he assumed Tally Man was engaging in, "Fuck. Call every cop in the precinct down on you why don'tcha?" He said, traveling by rooftop, "If that brat ain't Swiss cheese by now, I'm thinkin' his folks must've been part-alien or somethin'."

Musing to himself about why one stupid kid hadn't gotten himself shot yet, he wasn't able to see the approach from behind until it was too late to do anything.

White and black flashes filled his vision as he hit the rooftop of an apartment building, face-first. He tried to quickly return to his feet, but found his arms and legs bound tightly in a weapon that was familiar to him.

"Batman!" Zeiss spat, finding a bat-shaped shadow towering over his downed for, "Goddamn it, let me go and fight me like a man!" He struggled trying to get up and prove himself the superior fighter as far as Gotham City's underworld went.

He was doubly disappointed when the figure lowered itself from its higher perch and stood right by him.

"Sorry, not Bat_man_," Batgirl said, "So I don't think fighting like a man would fit in this instance. Pretty sloppy Zeiss, leaving yourself open like that," Apparently, that whole 'equal to Batman' thing only applied in hand-to-hand combat.

"Tally Man should have axed that stupid fuckin' Gabriel kid by now! This should've been over, and I'da beat you like the bitch of the Bat you are."

Batgirl narrowed her eyes at the slur and the fact that he was definitely in on the attempt against Max, "But it's not, and you didn't. Your stupid enhancements don't mean a thing when you can't actually see your target. Now where's Tally Man?" She didn't have time to banter with a defeated crook. One assassin was still unaccounted for and she hadn't even seen Max since he'd tried to make a run for it.

*Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!*

The clear sound of distant gunfire put a grin on the face of the Sicilian enforcer. Batgirl cursed under her breath and took off to try and stop the shooting at its source before someone was hurt… or killed.

XxX

As he got used to his suit, Null had learned something from increased use of the piece of equipment. When he got that weird static feeling that something was coming at him from a direction he couldn't see, he learned that it was in his best interest to _move away from that direction!_ Because he only had that instance to either avoid a threat altogether, or change something about the way he was moving to keep from getting killed.

Diving through the front window of the antique store seemed like a good idea at the time when he'd done it. It was better than getting shot up by an automatic weapon at least, by far. He landed in a heap in the street, but got back up as quickly as he could upon seeing Tally Man move to the opening to try firing at him again.

*RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!*

Null rolled along the pavement until he had taken himself out of Tally Man's line of sight, causing him to cease fire. The tall shooter jumped out of the open window, grinning more than ever as he seemed to have the upper hand.

Null took cover behind a nearby car, trying to think of a way to solve the problem before him, "Did you ever have one of those days where you could literally feel your luck turn? Like someone had their hand on a dial and twisted it over to complete shit?" He said, flinching at the spray of shots sent his way, "I was having a pretty great night, and then you showed up."

"You certainly like to talk don't you?" Tally Man pointed out, shooting at Null with one hand while single-handedly reloading the gun in his other hand, "You're quite yappy for a boy who's about to die."

"I don't like silence," Null said as more bullets impacted off of the car, some appearing to come closer and closer to him, 'Talking reminds me that I'm not dead yet.'

He ripped the license plate off of the bullet-riddled car and threw it out past the side of the car before getting up and clamoring over the top of the vehicle. Tally Man, shot his automatic at the plate and punched dozens of holes in it before it hit its apex. By that time Null was in the air after having jumped off of the roof of the car.

There wasn't any time to finish aiming his second gun Null's way before he landed right in front of him, grabbing both of his wrists to keep the guns from going inward. With Tally Man's middle wide open, Null lifted his foot and kicked Tally Man right in the family jewels without mercy.

Null swore he'd kicked him so hard he literally lifted off of the ground. At the very least it made him drop his automatic.

With that being done, Null hooked Tally Man in the jaw three times, turning his head and entire body with each punch landed. On the third punch, he stuck his forearm right in his neck and drove him back into the wall of the store they'd previously fought inside.

Null pinned Tally Man against a brick wall by his throat with his forearm, holding the barrel of his adversary's remaining gun right against his stomach. The contact with the palm of Null's hand sent light volts of electricity through him via the suit, enough to actually make his hand spasm. He came just short of shooting himself because of the sensation.

"Go ahead!" Null shouted, "Pull the trigger now!" He rammed his forehead into the taller man's nose and mouth five times, turning them into a bloody mess before stepping back and pulling him in, tripping him to the ground onto his stomach as if he were a kid tripping someone in a classroom aisle.

An award-winning pugilist he was not, but apparently it was enough to batter someone like Tally Man to a pulp when the guns weren't a-blazing. That was just fine with him.

Turning the arm he still held up behind Tally Man's back far enough that he knew without a doubt he had dislocated it, he heard the hitman yell and drop his gun to the ground. Falling forward with all of his weight and force, he pounded the downed man in the back of the head with one punch he put everything he had behind.

Not the most graceful of finishes, but the bastard didn't get up afterwards, which was the only thing that mattered.

Null jumped back up and kicked the gun as far down the street as he could before slapping Tally Man hard on the back of the head, sending his hat flying, "Fuck! You! How about you collect that!?" He bellowed at him, his adrenaline still pumping from a life-or-death situation and remembering the things that Tally Man had said to him before he'd been able to defend himself, "You sure collected that asskicking just now didn't you!?"

That man had pointed a gun at him, both in costume and out, and had tried unscrupulously to outright murder him on several occasions, in front of people. He was still getting used to people just trying to fight with him in general, and now he had just survived attempted murder from a contract killer.

There were no such things as training wheels when it came to crime, at least not in Gotham City.

Hands on his hips as he tried to catch his breath and calm his nerves, Null walked down the sidewalk, prepared to leave. With his back turned to Tally Man, he felt a presence shift and move and turned to fight what he felt would be a continued conflict. Instead he was met by the sight of Batgirl looking over his handiwork.

Perhaps he could slip away before she noticed he was there. Yes, that sounded like a fantastic idea.

"Null."

Damn it. He should have known from his inexpert display in the store against Tally Man that stealth wasn't his forte.

He'd been ready for fight and/or flight, but Batgirl was busier with keeping Tally Man from escaping of getting access to anymore of his firearms. She was still taking hidden guns off of his person as she spoke, "He didn't get you, did he?"

"No, he didn't get me, I don't think," Null said, sparing the unconscious Tally Man another look as Batgirl tied him up, "I'm good."

"You… beat the Tally Man," Batgirl said, quickly regaining her composure from a small measure of amazement. She'd called for support and dealt with Zeiss as quickly as she could, but Null had actually beaten her and her backup to the scene, 'He's getting used to actually fighting.'

An offended frown crossed Null's mouth, the only visible part of his face, "Fuck that guy. It was two on one when you fought me the first time," He said, feeling a tad offensive at his skills, or lack thereof. He quickly cooled down when he realized that she had in fact helped him, or Max anyway, "But thanks. I didn't know there'd been another one. I probably wouldn't have been able to beat him too."

'Does he mean together or separately?' She didn't see Null as the type to stand and fight against either the Tally Man or Zeiss, let alone both at the same time, "Well, you won't have to worry about him. Unless they have a third, he's sitting pretty and waiting on the police."

Null smiled under his hooded wrap as he looked at the heroine, "That's why I don't mind you capes that much. You might not like me, but you keep the killers and the psychos busy at least."

Speaking of which, Batgirl could see the empty shell casings littering the block and Tally Man's automatic weapon a ways away from where he was newly awake and trying in vain to move enough to warrant a getaway.

"Dodging gunfire?" She asked with a wry smile on her face, "I didn't think you were that attentive."

"Oh guns aren't that hard. It's not really about dodging… just don't let the barrel line up with the path of your movement," Null said, scratching his head at how dumb his reasoning sounded, "Well… that kind of works for me, because I'm kind of fast and move any way I want to," In the suit his reflexes were so good, stopping on a dime and immediately changing direction didn't create any loss of momentum.

"What I don't get is why you even fought him," Batgirl asked, "You don't fight."

Null didn't have a reason ready for why he would knowingly take on a fight with a bad guy. Not one that wouldn't either link him to Max or keep others from making the mistake of linking him to heroes. But then he realized, he didn't need a good excuse absolving himself of wrongdoing, just a reasonable one.

"He was stepping on my toes and getting in my way."

Batgirl then paid note of the store that the fight had clearly taken place in for the most part, and did the simple math that one would figure could go with it, "You're a criminal Null. I can't just let you go."

"You could, and you should because I didn't even get anything," Null said, pointing in the direction he knew the house party was in, " Hey, didn't a place get shot up before this started?" A slight moment of hesitance was the only opening Null needed to make himself scarce before Batman showed up, "Don't worry! You guys can take a shot at me when there's not two blocks full of bullet holes!" She heard him yell from wherever he'd run to.

The red-haired heroine bit her lip in exasperation at letting the new guy slip away so easily, "Well he definitely knows how to run away," He was a criminal, so why wasn't she feeling inclined to pursue?

If Batman found out that she'd let Null go without a fight, well she didn't want to think about how he would admonish her for that sort of lapse.

"So that was Null," A deep, dead-serious voice said from directly behind her. So used to hearing it was she that she didn't even register it at first.

Batgirl nodded before realizing who she was speaking to and turned around with a start. Standing before her was the man himself, tall and muscular, wearing a dark grey, almost black bodysuit. It was only accented by more black in his cape, bat-themed mask, boots, bat symbol on his chest, his protective gauntlets, and the yellow utility belt.

She felt markedly defensive until she realized something about Batman's timely arrival, "Wait, how long were you here? Did you watch the fight?"

Batman simply turned away from her with a flip of his black cape. It was the closest thing to a shrug she figured she was ever going to see out of him, "He's extremely raw. But then again, he isn't a fighter first. He's a thief."

"And you didn't go after him or even jump in?"

"Stepping in the middle of their fight wouldn't have served any purpose. And as weak a point as it was to save himself some face, he has a point. I think taking out a notorious contract killer takes priority at the moment over a teenager that failed a burglary," Batgirl wasn't certain, but she had a hunch that Batman was chiding her. She quickly shrugged it off.

"He beat him by himself, alone," Batgirl said, shaking her head, "A few weeks ago he couldn't lay a hand on us, and now he's taking on hired guns like Zeiss and Tally Man."

"We're not the only ones who train you know," Batman said with a permanent scowl etched on the lower portion of his face, "The police are already picking up Zeiss. You should go and check on that party, out of costume," Upon being met with a silent question of why, the experienced answered before she could ask, "Tally Man and Zeiss were after a kid weren't they?"

Batgirl's eyes went wide, remembering that they had been gunning for the kid that was her lab partner if she hadn't been mistaken. She never saw him again after she'd left to get into her gear and found Zeiss. For all she knew, Tally Man could have injured or killed him before Null got to him.

Batman watched her as she headed off to do as he told her, his thoughts fixated not on the subject of the failed assassination, but on the hooded young man that had taken off just moments before. He was the definition of small-time. Tonight he hadn't even managed to try and steal anything, only trash an antique store in the attempt.

All he'd managed to do was half of their job for them. It made him wonder just what the kid actually knew. His education seemed unfinished on all fronts, and here he was trying to be a criminal. A thief, "That kid's going to get himself killed."

Even if he didn't wind up getting busted, this sort of thing wasn't going to work for him down the line. Sooner or later, and Batman was wagering on sooner, Gotham City was going to throw its weight around, and more than anyone else, he knew that such a thing was enough to crush him.

"Holy crap, Null did this?" Robin asked as he stood on the downed hitman to keep him from squirming around, "I mean, I know it's not like he beat Deathstroke or something, but still… by himself?"

Robin didn't think much of the guy, but finding a way to beat a trained gunman was impressive to him. He didn't figure Null to be much of a fighter at all. Null clearly wasn't a coward, just overtly pragmatic. Obviously though, he wasn't knowledgeable enough to be dangerous with that sort of self-awareness of his own blatant limitations.

"Unarmed against a gunman," Batman added as he looked down at Tally Man, "Well, you were sent after a kid. I think it's kind of poetic that another one wound up stopping you."

"I'll see you choke on it one day Batman, be certain of that," Tally Man threatened despite his situation, "You'll pay what you owe, and so will that brat who did this."

"I doubt it."

XxX

(With Max)

Well wasn't this a fine way to end a Friday night? Walking back home after getting shot at and chased out of a party by a lunatic out for blood money. With a sigh he figured that this was just the sort of thing he was going to have to get used to.

'I'm pretty sure somebody was going to shoot at Null sooner or later,' He thought to himself, 'Just as long as I can keep the stuff I get myself into as Null away from myself, I think things could work out.'

He had no idea how though, as this night was clear example of just how easily his exploits in the costume could bleed over into regular life. For God's sake, Tally Man just strolled right into that party and called him out by name.

"And I ran away like a pussy in front of everybody," It was better than being shot, but if he thought he wasn't going to get an earful of it on Monday from everyone and the school staff combined he was a fool, "Well, so much for staying normal."

It was a nice dream while it had lasted, but until he retired Null and put distance between it and himself, as well as what his parents had been in life, that would probably never occur. Hopefully this was the only 'pleasant' surprise they'd left him with in their passing, rest their souls.

Max shook his head and looked up at the moon, obscured by the clouds in the sky, 'They'd probably be turning over in their graves if they knew I was using their suit to try and steal things. Or maybe they'd just be happy that it seems to work.'

Part of him wanted to hurry home before something else happened, but walking around in his street clothes was relaxing. And he didn't want to go home, as he felt he'd have nightmares of bad guys kicking in his door and putting a bullet in his head.

A hand set itself on his shoulder and a frantic Max cast it off before turning with his hand already cocked to throw a punch until he saw the concerned face of his lab partner. The prospect of striking her on accident because he was jumpy was almost enough to make him physically ill, "Oh, Barb… thank God. Did anybody get hurt."

Barbara cursed herself for moving as if she were still Batgirl. The poor guy hadn't even heard her coming before she'd grabbed him. Of course he'd figure someone still would have been after him, "No, you were the only one that man shot at. _You_ aren't hurt are you?"

"No," Max said listlessly, relieved in the pit of his stomach that no one else was harmed, "Just… surprised," He said with a bit of a laugh before his mood sobered, "Those guys were really going to kill me weren't they?"

Barbara knew he didn't need to hear an answer from her one way or the other. The question had been entirely rhetorical. But in the end, he was just a kid, not a criminal. For Zeiss and "Why?"

Max pursed his lips, wondering if he should even say anything. Oh, it didn't matter. This wasn't anything Null-related. It was all him, and he could tell his own stories if he wanted to. It wasn't as if it were a secret or anything.

"My parents were scientists, but they were out of work," The blond teenager said, "They kept working on a project they had even when I knew we didn't have the money for them to spend on private research. I never wondered where it came from. I guess I know now."

Loans from the wrong people. And without hearing any word from Max's father in the half-year since his death, they had to figure they were never going to get their money from that family, hence the attack. A psycho like Tally Man wouldn't care if he was just a kid. Children inherited the debts of the parents in many cases.

And all he got was a suit. A suit that he had no idea how it worked.

Talking about this sort of thing wasn't depressing to him. He'd come to terms with the way things had been before his father had died. He hadn't had to grieve for very long before accepting it, "I was too old to say they neglected me now, and I don't really hold any ill will against 'em. They weren't bad people and I don't want to be that guy. They were my parents, you know? They had a dream I guess. I just wish their dream didn't come back to try and shoot me in the ass tonight."

Barbara gave him a wry smile, "Do you know how much being Commissioner Gordon's daughter gets me targeted?" She asked, nudging him on the right arm at the wrist before pulling back with red on her fingertips, "You're bleeding," Barbara pointed out, indicating blood dripping from the bottom of his hand, "See? You actually got hit."

Max looked at his red-dripping wound as it began to sting and bite after getting his attention. His clothes were also stained where he'd pulled them off earlier to change, "I guess a bullet grazed me when I jumped that wall," It was the only time he could think of where a bullet would have hit his hand, and otherwise it looked like it had been open for a while and dripping behind him, "…Well that sucks."

Two months ago he would have reacted far differently to being touched by a gunshot, probably as if he were a foot away from dying. Now he knew full well that it wasn't a big deal because it hadn't even gone into anything.

"Don't try to be tough," Barbara said, "Someone just tried to kill you."

"I'm not, it's just a scratch," Max insisted, "If I was tough, I would have kicked that guy's ass instead of running off like a deer," It was clear that running had been the clear course of action, but macho was macho, "I'm going to go fix this before another hitman tries to blow my damn head off," He said, figuring he should tell at least one person where he was going. Maybe she'd let the cops know that he was actually alive so he wouldn't have to do it, "The police don't need me do they?"

"No, no. I'll let them know you're alright," The hidden heroine said, shooing him off "Just take care, and be careful. Don't get shot again before Monday would you?"

That had been enough to bring a huge grin out of Max for the first time in a while. He hadn't even had to dodge bullets as Null, and here he'd had to do it outside of his thief suit first. What was a simple quip to Barbara was a major inside joke to Max, and he was thankful for the reason to laugh.

"I wish I could make you that sort of promise, but I really wouldn't know if I could," Max said, seeing things much better when he could find a way to laugh at them, "Tell you what. I'll make an effort to not get shot at for the rest of the weekend… even though you'd probably get a better lab partner if I got plugged."

Ah, now he could make her laugh, and he reveled in the sound of hearing her giggle. Seeing as how being cool wasn't his thing, self-deprecation seemed to be working much better, "That's so wrong," She said, "Just go home. After this, I think dad would have some officers watch out around your neighborhood for a little while."

Max nodded and crossed the street to head off back to his own neighborhood. He didn't really have another place to stay for the night, and he needed to return there anyway.

There was something he had to do to make all of this go away.

XxX

(The Next Day – East End)

East End was a truly gross place. Max counted being threatened by junkies wielding knives a number of five times as he walked past them since he'd arrived on the train. He made a note to himself to never go there at night without his suit. Maybe more. He was fortunate that he was carrying his money in a nondescript backpack that any kid his age would have on them. Without a doubt, if anyone knew how much he was carrying, they would have stuck him up at gunpoint and shot him for it.

At least he was finally getting to see more of the city!

Yes, he'd seen the people sleeping underneath the train bridge, the ones that were in clear sight of the street yet were ignored by everyone: the single fate that scared him more than anything else on the planet that he'd come across so far.

He'd seen three 'hotels' that he knew for a fact no one stayed at for the reasonable overnight rates and the room service, as well as the pleasurable company hanging out on the sidewalk nearby offering their 'services'.

Eventually he made his way to a particular strip club. It was common knowledge amongst those who frequented the East End area that it was an operating point for a particular branch of a crime family, the one that his parents owed money to.

The bouncer out front let him in, and all he had to do was open up the bag on his back full of money. He escorted him right to the back where Max caught sight of the manager of the club, someone who was clearly surprised to see him alive. He'd obviously heard about what had happened to his two hired guns the night before.

Preempting anything that the man would have possibly said, Max dropped the unzipped bag on the table, letting dollars spill out of the top of it as something of a show. Whatever the manager was going to say died in his throat. It allowed him the time to go ahead and smooth things over as best as he could.

"Could you, I don't know, maybe tell me that my parents owed you guys money before you send killers after me?" Max said, his voice in a dreadful, asking kind of tone, as if he were afraid to offend, "I'm… I… just… take it."

He had to sell fear. And he had to pay the mobsters. If they sent Tally Man and that Zeiss guy, and both of them got stopped, who would they send next? Getting saved by Batman and Null would have only made the mobsters go at Max even harder the next time. It didn't take a genius to think of that much.

Barbara said that maybe police would keep watch over his neighborhood after the attempt on his life, but for how long? A day? A week? That wasn't good enough. He needed them out of his hair, and paying them off was the best way to make sure they left him alone. If they didn't have a reason to bother with him they wouldn't.

The collector flipped through the stacks of money, counting it all up before nodding. The kid hadn't just thrown in interest. He clearly didn't know how much his parents had owed in the first place. It had been substantial for certain, but he had paid more than the debt had been, "Shit. Where'd somebody like you come up with this much money?"

"I don't want to talk about it," And he really didn't. He was handing over almost all of his hard-earned spoils.

The loan shark grinned and handed the money off to his muscle to put away for later, "You know, most people think that just because they got saved by cops or by the Batman one time, we leave 'em alone. Guess you're smarter than that. Good for you."

In other words, they really would have sent someone else after him. It made him feel more confident that he'd made the right choice, as much as it irked him.

Max nodded and took that as his cue to get out of there and never look back. That hadn't been a small payment. It had been everything he'd had. All he had left was five-thousand. It wasn't where he'd started, but it was as close to square one as he'd felt comfortable getting.

After getting back out onto the street, Max dropped his fearful, tentative expression and scowled at his rotten luck as he shuffled home.

Great. So now he was broke. Again. And at least one bad guy would be harboring a grudge against Null until he finally put a bullet in him. He wasn't sure how well Gotham City's justice system had been reformed since Batman came around and started trying to fight fear with fear in cleaning the place up, but he didn't want to take any chances on Tally Man staying where he belonged for very long. No one ever seemed to.

Maybe Selina was right? Maybe Gotham City was too much too soon? He wasn't even dipping into the heavy stuff and he'd found enough trouble to kill a normal man.

Gotham City was _not_ the place to cut one's teeth in.

After coming to that realization that should have been obvious had it not been for the fact that he'd grown up there, he came to another one that chilled him further.

If it wasn't for his becoming Null in the first place, he would be dead.

If he had never found that suit, never felt his back close enough against the wall to start stealing, had never run across Selina Kyle, had never begun training hard enough to deal with the denizens of the night who would be out to throw him behind bars, the same thing with the hitmen would have happened, only he would have probably been working a night job when they came for him.

It also would have ended much differently.

He wouldn't have had any sort of inkling on what to do when being chased, he wouldn't have ever gained a level enough head to deal with gunfire, and he wouldn't have had a handy-dandy suit to augment everything he'd been learning and training to do.

"…Damn it," Max muttered to himself, sitting on a bus as he headed back to his corner of town. Looking out the window he realized just how bad off he was, "…I've got to get the hell out of here," That city was going to kill him if he didn't.

He had to take a chance. His rent was paid for the next few months and his back-rent was cleared, so he could leave his apartment for a little while and go somewhere else.

Five-thousand dollars was enough to take him somewhere, and if he played his savings right he could live off of it for a little while if he needed to. More than long enough to make more to replace what he'd spent on digging himself out of trouble. A cheap motel, and an armful of groceries, he'd be set for a few weeks if necessary.

Yeah, that would work. It had to. It was all a matter of experience, and while he _could_ get that in Gotham City, the place would be more likely to take his life instead if he tried.

It was decided then. He was going home to pack his stuff, and then he'd be catching the first ride he could out of town.

* * *

**This isn't exactly a traditional hero's story, because the hero isn't a hero. At least not yet… and not intentionally. **

**But hearing it from me isn't exactly fun for you the reader, so if you enjoy the story I'll just have to keep trying to entertain you folks.**

**Until the next time then, Kenchi out.**


	3. On-The-Job Training

Disclaimer: I do not own DC. If I did, I think I would be schizophrenic with all of the alternate realities, universes, and reboots.

**Chapter 3: On-The-Job Training**

* * *

New York City.

…Hm. It honestly reminded Max of Gotham, only slightly bigger but somehow less scary.

But at least there was no Batman, or any superpowered villains to cross that he knew of.

A shiver went down his spine at that moment, but he blamed it on the deceptive chill of early March creeping through his jacket.

For school he'd made the excuse of needing two weeks in New York to handle what was left of his parents' affairs. It was effective enough. It wasn't like there was anyone that the school could call to verify any of it.

So Max was veritably free of anyone checking up on him, not that anyone would have anyway. The party in Gotham City showed him exactly where he'd stood and how far he'd slipped when it came to any sort of social connection with others. They knew him, but nothing recent as far as his life went. Definitely, none of them would come knocking if he didn't show his face for a short stretch of time.

Depressing? Maybe. But at the same time it was extremely useful for being a damned criminal.

And he was getting to sightsee around New York! Although it was basically to pick up on some quick go-to spots for different instances in case he ever wound up in those areas, but it was still more than a lot of people his age got to check out.

A part of him missed being normal and being able to take in things without having to think of them as something 'work-related', but there wasn't any crying over spilt milk in this instance.

One day, when he was done with the crime and could throw away the Null suit for good, he'd at least have tons of killer stories to tell to his kids and grandchildren.

'Hey kids, do you want to hear about the time your dear old dad went to New York to learn how to not get his ass handed to him by crazy crooks and superheroes?'

The thought was enough to make him laugh as he looked away from his phone app on the train systems and boarded the one he needed to return to his motel.

Life was certainly unexpected.

XxX

(Gotham City - Batcave)

Nothing interesting was happening at school, and Barbara was finding that her daily life was just something she went through the motions on while waiting for the sun to go down. The only thing of note was that she had to work in as a third person on a lab team because her usual partner was out, apparently off to take care of some business of his late family.

She yawned while checking over and compacting Bat-a-rangs to refill her supply of the all-purpose tool. Daytime was so boring.

Well aware that she wasn't alone, as Alfred was watching over the safety controls for the training equipment as Tim took to practicing as they waited for night to fall, Barbara was able to ignore them and tend to her own thoughts.

Not for long though, as people could never let things simply lie.

"What are you thinking about so hard over there?"

Getting out and searching for something at night, "Nothing really."

"You're totally lying."

Setting the Bat-a-rangs aside, Barbara spun around in her chair to watch Tim practice against a few training droids, "So why don't you tell me what I'm thinking if you're so sure Tim?" She was willing to humor him if he was really going to be that cheeky about it.

He didn't even need to stop fighting in order to get out his answer to her, "You're probably thinking about that guy, Null."

Damn him. He really took to the analytical, investigative part of Bruce's training, and it was annoying. He always wanted to try and look for something, even when there wasn't anything to find. And seriously, there was nothing to find here.

"What about him exactly? Null is Null," Barbara said, checking over her utility belt and making sure she didn't need to restock any other equipment, "He's not a big deal at all, so I don't know why you're bringing him up Tim."

"Because you let him go," Tim pointed out with a laugh at her expense, "You didn't even chase him after me and Bruce showed up to handle taking in Tally Man, so don't use that excuse."

"I had to make sure my classmate was still alive," Barbara was beginning to feel a little exasperated by the conversation, "Zeiss and Tally Man were sent to kill him and I didn't know when Null showed up to beat Tally Man. Anything could have happened to Max before that."

"It is odd," Alfred pointed out, receiving a pointed look from the lady for his trouble that didn't even cause him to flinch, "I'm not taking it back."

"You've been looking out for more burglaries than anything else lately," Tim pointed out, getting Barbara's ire back on him and off of Alfred, "Whenever we split up duties, that's what you always pick. We used to have to compromise over who got to take down the street crime because that's where the action is."

Barbara raised an eyebrow belying just how annoying she found the prodding, "And because I want to catch a known serial thief that we're actually aware of, whom you just pointed out that I let go once before, I'm fixated on him?"

"-Like he's got space leased out in your head," Tim said unapologetically, "I guess it's because for once we ran into a guy criminal in Gotham who's actually a teenager."

A guy? Really? Null? He was implying that she was attracted to Null? Just… no. He was a selfish criminal first and foremost. Not exactly significant other material. Second of all, none of them knew what he looked like underneath that hood thing he wore.

"I kicked him off of a roof," Barbara deadpanned.

"Yeah, by accident," Tim laughed. If they were going off of random spurts of violence as eliminators for this sort of thing, no superhero would ever be attracted to another, or to a villain, "You know that you know better."

She didn't have to stoop to his level to get to him. Barbara was more than intelligent enough to know how to philosophically combat everything that Tim was saying. She was capable of debunking every aspect of Tim's theories and setting them off to the side.

…But where was the instant gratification in that?

"Spoiler."

Tim's reaction from that one name was immediate. The wind couldn't have been taken out of his sails any faster, "That's low Barb," He said, idly lashing out with a kick to knock one of the droids away from him.

XxX

(Later That Night – Elsewhere in Gotham City)

Now this was more like it.

Between training the brat she affectionately deemed not-her-problem and laying low after her last big job, Catwoman hadn't had a good night on the prowl for a potential target in well over three months. She was well overdue to sate her desire (more of a need, really) to pilfer things of value from anyone she saw fit.

It was great to be back on the job. Liberating. And if she played her cards just right, there was a chance she'd run across her favorite vigilante in all of the land.

"Selina."

Ooh, speak of the devil. She must have been a good girl to get a present like that so early in the year.

Catwoman stopped her climb, one of her clawed gloves still stuck deep into the brick wall of the building she'd been scaling. Standing on a lower building, cloaked in the shadows of the one she was on, she could see the man who had called out to her.

A grin playing on her lips, she flipped off of the wall and landed smoothly on the rooftop below, "Well, well, well. What a surprise. Normally you don't come around to see me unless I've taken something or you want something. And seeing as how I haven't stolen anything in at least a few months now I've got to ask, what do you want Bruce?"

"Have you heard of any new serial thieves coming out of the woodwork?" Batman asked, not willing to play along with her attempt to banter, "And I mean brand new. Not someone who came in from somewhere else," Whoever 'Null' was, he was local. Born and raised. He had to be. No other kid would take on Gotham City first unless they had been born and raised there and had nothing else to compare it to.

Catwoman already knew who he was talking about. Even if she hadn't heard of anything that he would have done, apparently Maxie had run afoul of the Dark Knight or one of his trainees somewhere down the line. She wondered how bad she pissed him or any of his off… or how he'd managed to get away.

"Hard to say. Nobody tends to start solo here very often," Gotham's crown princess of thievery basically purred as she circled Batman slowly, "That's suicide," For more than one reason.

"I know," Batman deadpanned, "I've never seen all of his face, but he's a kid. 5'11, looks pretty athletic, has a strange green suit that seems to do something with electricity," At least that was what he'd gleaned from seeing him human stun-gun Tally Man and stick to walls with no support, "His name is Null."

"Null you say?" Catwoman said, a smirk pulling at her lips upon hearing Max's alias, "That's funny. It wasn't what I was calling him when he was hanging around me, but it's not bad all things considered. Doesn't really mean anything, but I guess it doesn't have to."

It was probably better that it didn't. Any way to keep it away from his day life was the best for him altogether.

"He's yours?"

"Oh don't be that way Bruce. He's too young for me. You're still the one."

"I didn't know you were the type to train an apprentice," Batman said, getting a scoff out of the feline-themed femme as he completely blew off her jesting advance, "This isn't a game Selina. Where is he?"

Catwoman sighed at the misunderstanding and leaned against the railing, slouching provocatively, "I'm not the kid's keeper. It's just that he was so pathetic I had to teach him something. He wouldn't have lasted one night out there if I hadn't."

"You taught him how to be a better criminal?"

"It's better than what would happened to him if I hadn't done anything," Catwoman defended, no shame in her words whatsoever, "I'm not going to say that giving him a crash course was necessarily the right thing to do, but we're not all rich. Doing the right thing is fine and all, but when you're in the gutter it won't get you out."

The scowl around Batman's mouth softened a hair. She tried so often to seem as if she didn't care for anything. That simply wasn't the case. Selina picked and chose what things to feel morality over, "So whatever his situation is, that's what got to you."

Before she'd become a thief, Selina's life hadn't exactly been rosy. That was to say the very least about it. She wasn't much for sharing the details but suffice it to say, she hadn't exactly had pleasant experiences with Gotham's dark side before she finally got the ability to take her own piece for herself.

"I'm not saying anymore about it," Catwoman asserted. She knew she'd already said too much as it was. His mood changed far too quickly for him to still be entirely in the dark about how to find Null, "Just remember… you don't need to go nuclear on him if you're the one who gets to him Bruce. He's just a thief."

And this he knew. If Batman had one soft spot it was for youngsters in tough situations.

Null hadn't hurt anyone. Anyone innocent at least. He'd actually helped, albeit entirely indirectly. He hadn't used anyone. He wasn't organized crime, he wasn't trying to take control of any market or racketeer. He wasn't a goon for one of the crime families or a henchman for any of the crazies in town, and after checking over his thefts he did what he could to ensure that they were victimless crimes.

But they were still crimes.

He was a punk kid who decided to rip stuff off to put food in his stomach, and it just so happened that he ran into the best possible person he could have to show him how.

Batman looked over his shoulder from where he was prepared to drop over the edge of the building and remained in place for a second, an impassive expression on what was visible of his face, "I'll keep that in mind," With a soft swoop of his cape heralding his otherwise soundless exit, Catwoman was left alone to her own devices.

But her own devices had been altered because of the short conversation she'd just had.

Who knew Batman could be such a buzzkill?

"Goddamn it. I don't even feel like scoping out the score anymore," She muttered to herself, resigning to head home for the night, "I _told_ him better."

-To cover his fucking tracks. And if he hadn't… ooh he was in for it soon.

Selina didn't know how Max had been selling his stolen wares in the past, but she had to make sure to send him in the direction of a reliable fence. Chances were, he was doing it in a way that was traceable, which wasn't necessarily a death sentence for generic items, but if he ever took something that was one-of-a-kind and tried to sell it, he'd find Batman on his doorstep before the money was ever in his grasp.

Stupid kid.

XxX

(Meanwhile – New York City)

The best way to keep the capes off of his back was a simple solution. You had to keep the police out of it, and the best way to do that was to rob criminals. It was so simple, but it was also incredibly dumb, simply because of the danger factor. Max didn't recognize this however. His resolution to separating the things he took upon himself as Null and his 'normal' life, the importance of which came first, was astonishing.

All he really had to do was keep an ear out, and eventually something would come up where he'd be able to get one over on a villain. He'd take whatever they'd stolen for himself and let them take the heat for it. It'd have to be something he could make count though, for all the trouble it was going to be.

It didn't really take him that long to strike gold in that department, as one of the places he'd been watching for, a museum near Battery Park wound up being hit one night. The report over police scanners declared that there had been something taken by a criminal he'd heard of.

Selina had heard of Copperhead and had told Max something about him back when she'd been giving him a crash course in the fine art of burglary and other criminal activities.

From what he'd been told, Copperhead was one person he figured he could rip off and get away from.

Lying in wait, he moved the moment he felt another presence moving along the rooftops, a place normally reserved for him as in the time he'd been there he hadn't seen anyone else traipsing about up there at night.

It didn't take much to catch up to him. All it took was a bit of pedal to the medal and he overtook him quickly enough to land a jumping kick to the back that sent his target headfirst through a rooftop greenhouse window.

"Man, for a contortionist he was pretty solid," Null mused, remembering the feeling of the blow he'd stricken. Anyway, it didn't matter now. He'd just gone headfirst through greenhouse glass. He wasn't getting up anytime soon after something like that.

Any other steps he would have taken toward entering the greenhouse ended when he heard a threatening hiss that sounded like the type an anaconda or another mammoth snake would make.

The rest of the hole that Copperhead had created after being kicked into it was torn open enough for his full form to emerge, apparently little worse for wear and incredibly miffed.

When Null actually got a good look at him, what he wound up getting hadn't been what he had expected.

What stood before him was a large snake-man in blue jeans, rust orange in the color of his scales with black marks. Trailing behind him was a long tail, further confirming that this wasn't quite a human being. Slung over his shoulder and hanging by his waist was a satchel containing the valuable that he'd stolen, but that was the furthest thing from the would-be thief's mind at the moment.

'Holy shit, I heard that was a suit!' Null thought to himself, grateful that Copperhead couldn't see his expression underneath his hood, 'He was supposed to be some sort of contortionist! Goddamn rumor mills!'

If anger could be conveyed through the eyes of a snake, they would have been through Copperhead's. He sized Null up, his tongue flicking out into the air as he observed him, "And just who are you supposed to be? You're a stupid-looking one."

"And you look like you should have your own show on Animal Planet," Null reflexively said before he realized that he'd just insulted the big snake man. But by then his mouth was already running as something of a calming mechanism helping him to cope, "Say, you didn't happen to swallow whatever it was that you took did you? I know snakes do that."

Copperhead reached into his satchel and pulled out a small package that was covered up from Null's view, "I don't like to eat things that weren't… alive at one point. What does a kid like you want with me?"

"Well I figured, you're a criminal, so who's gonna care when I rob you?" Null said, "What are you gonna do anyway, call the police?"

"How about kill you instead?" Copperhead hissed out with his flickering forked tongue, "I wonder what a rotten brat like you would taste like."

Wait, wasn't he at least partially human himself? And he was into eating other people?

Even so, all of this had a point to it, and running away empty-handed without as much as a fight wasn't it.

"I'm not backing down from you. I might be younger than you, smaller than you, weaker than you, and way less experienced, but I-," He then froze after thinking everything through. He had _nothing_ on this particular bad guy at all, "-Think this was a horrible decision."

"I agree," Copperhead said with a laugh.

Null heaved breaths in anticipation before deciding to just go with it. He wanted the experience? Well that included the dangerous portion of things as well. Gritting his teeth, he clenched his fists and ran forward to engage the snake-themed crook.

Copperhead dropped his loot and chuckled despite his former anger at his situation. A kid in over his head would be quick enough to kill before getting away, "Everyone wants to put on a cape and be a superhero these days."

"I'm not a hero," Null said, throwing caution to the wind and going right at him to land the first punch, "But I appreciate the 'super' part!" Copperhead caught his fist in his hand before it even reached his face. Swinging the youngster's arm downward, Copperhead lowered his head and charged Null, slamming the top of his head into his entire body like a bulldozer.

Sent flying, Null flipped through it and landed on his feet only to find Copperhead right in front of him, arms over his head in a double sledgehammer motion that he swung down on top of him. Null dodged to the side and ripped away with punches at Copperhead's exposed body as fast as he could throw them.

Feeling the pain from the punches and the shocks that came along with them, Copperhead whipped his tail at Null and smacked him right across the face, knocking him to the ground.

Null winced and dabbed at the cut that had been sliced into his cheek by the mutated metahuman's whip-like appendage, "Okay, that really hurt," The tail wrapped itself around his leg and dragged him across the roof despite his best efforts to hold on to something.

Mercilessly he slammed Null into the brick wall of a stairwell and then into an A.C. unit, throwing sparks and debris all over before dropping him with an added shake as he tossed him aside.

The thief let out an agonized groan as he picked himself back up, "God. Why is everybody better than me!?"

"I was an assassin before I became _this_," Copperhead said, emphasizing his altered physiology as he took great satisfaction in the clear pain the boy was in, "I used contortionism to get to my targets to kill them. But I have to say, there's something special about running straight through someone as annoying as you."

Despite taking the beating of his lifetime thus far, there wasn't really anything else Null could do other than face it head-on and piss his foe off further.

"Forget stealing from you!" Null taunted, "I should just make a pair of shoes outta your ass and give 'em to my girlfriend," At least the tail wasn't wrapped around his leg anymore.

Copperhead punched at Null, only for him to divert it by blocking at the inside of his forearm. Null dropped a heavy uppercut into the snake-man's belly in response, but Copperhead grabbed his arm and dropped an elbow down between his shoulder blades, dropping him to the roof again, much to his amusement.

'Am I even hurting him?' Null had to wonder it as Copperhead picked him up by the loose hood wrapping around his head and neck and threw him again, this time off of the roof, "Shii-, GAH!" He bounced off of the side of an elevated train track and fell from that point forward, 'What's with people throwing me off of-!' *CRASH* "…Roofs…" He weakly spat.

Once again, after falling a minimum of three stories, he landed on a car. This time face down on the top of one of many parked along the curb of the street. He basically headbutted some poor bastard's sunroof upon making contact. He'd have had more sympathy if blood wasn't leaking from his head like milk from a cracked coconut.

Copperhead stared down off of the roof at the thoroughly tenderized brat that he'd hurled off of the building they'd been on, "I couldn't have aimed him any better if I'd been looking," He boasted to himself, "Time to pick up what's left then."

He slithered his way down and stalked his way over to Null before reaching out for him with his tail. As if being jolted back to life, Null grabbed Copperhead's tail in his hands the moment it got close and went through the broken sunroof into the car.

Hissing in panic, Copperhead struggled, but Null had taken the initiative and pulled a good length of his tail through, tying it to something before hopping out of a car door on the side opposite Copperhead. Jumping back onto the roof of the car, he treated Copperhead's cranium like a soccer ball and took aim with the hardest low kick he could throw, "Thar's a snake in mah boot!"

The result upon the strike landing? That feeling that you get when you hit a baseball just right. Perfection.

The monster went slack across the top of the sedan, and Null decided that now was his best chance to run. Whether he was unconscious or dazed, whether he'd actually won the fight or not, it didn't matter. He slipped the satchel off of Copperhead and jumped off the car before taking off running.

The sound of metal being torn caused him to turn around in time to see a car door fly at him. He rolled out of the way to avoid it, but quickly found himself pinned to a passing light post, once again by the tail. Unfortunately it soon grew much worse than that.

"I never kicked anything that hard in my life!" Null said, struggling in vain as the grip of Copperhead's entire body surrounded him and constricted ruthlessly. He really was something of a snake. A human's spine would never let them do anything of the sort, "Stay down fool!"

"You wrapped my tail in a seatbelt," Copperhead said to the trapped thief spitefully, "I was a contortionist when I was a human. Really boy, did you think that would hold me?"

"It worked for like… ten good seconds," Null squeaked out, feeling the air rush out of his body. He couldn't fight it, no matter how he tried to writhe and flex to try and give himself some room to breathe.

Copperhead's body squeezed the light post hard enough to cause it to groan underneath the pressure, to say nothing of what he was doing to Null's body. The snake-human hybrid could feel the boy's bones cracking and Null could feel his vision growing darker.

"You're less than worthless," Copperhead taunted, feeling Null's muscles and bones give way, "The only good you'll ever do anyone is as food," He heard Null try to say something back, but the complete lack of air getting to his lungs prevented him from saying anything, "What was that?"

Instead of words, he received the response in the form of an electric shock emanating from the entirety of Null's body. Copperhead let out a loud yell and his muscles went slack enough for his quarry to fall to the ground, free of his coils.

Null sharply sucked in as much air as he could from where he was on the ground, "Love ya mom. Love ya dad," His head was swimming too much for him to stand back up just yet. Oh sweet mother of Jesus, if it weren't for that suit not only would he never have escaped, his back would have been broken before he had.

But he still had the satchel, and he'd hit Copperhead with the equivalent of five separate stun guns. And he was exhausted because of it. He hadn't been running and jumping comparatively hard, and while he'd been taking a beating he knew he was more fit than this. He felt one hair shy of crashing out entirely, running on absolute empty.

He had no idea why that particular move made him so tired, as the electric discharge was just an aspect of the suit and whatever powered it, but he figured that from then on it would be best to NEVER do that again.

That was the last decision he made before his eyes felt too heavy for him to ignore, 'No, I can't sleep now,' Every move he tried to make drained whatever he had left even more, 'Get up!'

Copperhead eventually rose, his body suffering the effects of being electrocuted with tight muscles and fits of pain running through his system. His body could endure a lot, but his hide wasn't nearly tough enough to just shrug off things like that.

Fortunately the perpetrator of his pains lay motionless on the ground barely ten feet away.

Well wasn't that convenient?

Close to being in a rage, Copperhead stomped over to Null and picked him up by his neck before grinning cruelly and unhinging his jaw. He normally didn't devour things whole, but the kid had been enough of an annoyance that the sort of slow death that would come with being eaten alive seemed suitable.

"Didn't know kids for bein' part of a healthy diet, even fer snakes."

Copperhead closed his mouth and looked over to where he could see a muscular figure standing on the lowest level of a fire escape. He was clad in an entirely black bodysuit with a cat-themed cowl that left his mouth and scruffy lower jaw uncovered, as well as fists wrapped up in heavy, thick tape.

With no fanfare whatsoever, he dropped down into the alley and walked out into the open, his hands up and prepared for combat. No nonsense whatsoever.

Sparing a glance at Null, Copperhead scoffed and tossed him away, choosing to place all of his attention on the newcomer, "Word was that you retired, Wildcat," He spat the name like a curse.

The identified 'Wildcat' grinned at causing the villain annoyance just from his mere presence, "Eh, semi," He said, "I ain't out lookin' for punks anymore. But when they're tearin' shit up in my neck a' the woods, why not spend a night crackin' some skulls?"

The night was just getting worse and worse for the human reptile. With a flicker of his forked tongue he mused that things could have been worse. After all, Wildcat didn't have powers. Even if he'd taken quite a bit of time dealing with the kid in the suit, he still had more than enough to handle some cape that didn't even have superpowers.

That was what he thought anyway. And then the fight started.

Newly reawakened, Null sat himself against the side of a car and watched the ensuing battle between man and snake. What he saw only made him wonder even more just what he'd gotten himself into.

A stocky, ripped guy in a costume that reminded him vaguely of a cat (what was it with people who had cat themes around him?) physically annihilated Copperhead.

Whereas he had been fighting to survive and escape from Copperhead the entire time, Wildcat unleashed the vilest beating onto another being that Null had ever seen. He'd done it all with nothing but his bare hands. Pure boxing.

"Where do these guys come from?" Null muttered to himself, unable to take his eyes off of the display before him as Wildcat dropped Copperhead one last time. He didn't get back up, and then Wildcat turned his eyes to Null, who then took Copperhead's satchel off to hand over to the hero, "Uh… hey, I got what he stole! Thanks for helping me stop him!"

Rule number three. No haul is worth your life or your freedom, and this jig had long since been up. Physically speaking, Null couldn't have fought back or run away anymore if he'd even been inclined to do so. He didn't exactly have a scrapper's mentality to begin with.

And that aside, for God's sake the guy still had Copperhead's blood dripping off of his fists! There was such a thing as self-preservation!

"Well look at this," Wildcat said, looking over the battered youth before him, "They just keep makin' 'em younger, don't they?" He said, picking Null up and dusting him off, "Took guts to try and take on Copperhead kid."

'Not really. It was either fight him or let him kill me,' Null thought to himself, but smiling on what was visible of his face. Not only had the guy saved his life, but he was treating him like a good guy, "Yeah, you would've _seen_ my guts if that lasted any longer. If it's all the same to you, I'd rather have the skills."

"Eh, can't be that bad if ya actually walked away," Wildcat said, playing off the beatdown that Null had just taken, of which he'd caught the very tail end of, "All ya need's some schoolin'."

A grimace crossed Null's face underneath his wrap hood. Yes, he was aware of that. It was the entire reason he'd come to New York in the first place. And other than ripping off small change from street criminals and drug dealers in town, the first time he'd stepped out and tried anything on someone he thought would be fairly simple to deal with, he got beaten black and blue for the most part.

Training with Selina had mostly been about procedure and how to do the job properly. What combat training was covered was only done to make sure he actually knew what it was like to be in a real fight. He had slight knowledge of one martial art; kickboxing. And that was from classes as a kid that he retained knowledge from because it was a good workout and the reflexes helped with the sports he'd tried to play before his parents died.

"Right," Null said, turning around with a click of his tongue, "I'll look into that," He was miffed enough that he wanted to say more, but he was pushing his luck as it was, "Later."

"Wait. I can't just let ya go," Immediately, Null figured that there was no way his fortunes could possibly be that bad. Wildcat knew he was a thief. Of course he did, the guy was a superhero! And now he was going to jail, "You're probably the type that'll get yourself killed, and I can't send a rookie hero off when he's as green as goose shit like you. I'd never be able to live with myself."

Really?

Thankfully it was dark and Null's eyes were shaded by his hood, because he was certain that he had the dumbest expression on his face above his mouth.

Wildcat… thought he was a hero?

That was just fantastic. No kidding.

Null shrugged, trying to appear that he'd kept his composure, "So, what now?"

"Well I guess I can show ya how to throw a half-decent punch. I'm a pretty good trainer," Wildcat boasted, pointing his thumb at himself, a five o'clock shadow surrounding his grin, "The more brats like you do this, the less I've gotta step out and handle it myself."

Underneath the hood, Max had to think to himself. Which option would be dumber? Lying to Wildcat about being a superhero in order to get some kind of training from someone who clearly knew what they were doing and was willing to share, or turning him down and going off into that dark night to deal with whatever came his way next?

He'd gotten lucky twice. Robin and Batgirl kicked his butt, and Copperhead almost crushed him like a grape. If one were to go off of the old adage 'three strikes and you're out', the next time he ran into that sort of trouble unprepared, he'd find himself pushing up daisies.

But he'd come to New York to cut his teeth and learn something that could help him back in Gotham City. The opportunity was being dangled in front of him like a big, juicy steak, and even though there was obviously a dangerous hook in it, all he had to do was keep the thing from hooking his jaw so to speak.

Hell, he could lie for long enough to get himself trained. And then he would never come back to New York. Wildcat would never even know he'd trained a thief to fight back against his own colleagues more than likely, and if he did, Null didn't even plan on operating on his turf.

Life was certainly unexpected.

XxX

(Three Weeks Later – Gotham City)

There was a numb feeling reentering a familiar environment after you spent a certain amount of time away, something that made you feel tired walking back through the doors of your own home, even if you'd spent the entire time either relaxing or working. It could have been something of a traveler's syndrome. Max didn't know how to describe it exactly.

What he did know was that Wildcat worked the hell out of him. In one month, he'd packed on four pounds of muscle. The man knew what he was doing, as harsh of a taskmaster as he tended to be. When he trained people he knew would be fighting for their lives, the man didn't mess around.

For the little hovel that it was, it was really good to be home again.

Shutting the door to his apartment, Max set his bags on his couch and set his lunch on the counter in the kitchen corner, taking a deep breath of relief at making it back. He unwrapped half of a sub and prepared to take a bite, "Whoever's in here, come out," It wasn't a big place, so if anyone else was around there were signs.

Signs like the foreign smell that came with other people intruding on your ambient space.

From the back, Selina came out with a smirk on her face. She looked markedly out of place in her high-end clothes to be slumming it around in his neck of the woods. That alone made the intrusion odd, not mentioning the agreement they'd come to the last time they'd run across each other.

The two just stood away from each other, and Max decided that if they weren't going to talk, he was going to eat, and did just that until Selina spoke up, "You just going to stand there, Maxie?"

It took a moment of chewing before the teenager responded, his mouth half-full, "I'll be honest, I've had dreams that started out exactly like this," Max said, "Some of them involving you actually," He added shamelessly, continuing to munch on his sub as she just stared him down, "…I'm not apologizing."

It was far from the first time she'd been hit on and with as lazily as Max had done it, it wasn't even worth rising to comment on.

"Cute," Selina said before getting to the point, "And you've been where exactly?"

Max went to his refrigerator and winced at the smell after looking inside for something to drink. Of course all of his perishables went bad before he got back. He left so quickly he hadn't even checked for them. Gross, "What? Did you miss me or something?"

Selina hissed at him and wondered if scratching him would be too disproportionate a response, "Batman put two and two together and figured out our little connection."

That actually prompted Max to stop eating for a moment. 'The Man' himself actually asked about him. That was disconcerting. In essence though, he was probably just keeping tabs on the new blood. It was kind of his job after all, to gauge the threat level of the crooks and lunatics that ran around Gotham City.

And Max knew he wasn't one of the more notable crazies, "So? Unless you're telling me he knows who I am and he's in the back right now too? Because I don't see you and him staying in the same place and leaving all of my furniture where it is."

"Oh, you don't even know," Selina said with an impish demeanor about her. Max didn't even want to know. He'd been implying a fight, but it was clear that she hadn't been thinking of the same thing, "But no. If he thinks you're my protégé, he'll try and make you quit or he'll try and turn you."

And what exactly would be the reasoning behind that? Max had been under the impression that the few heroes who did know about him thought very little of him, "But he thinks I suck doesn't he?" Max legitimately asked.

"That won't-. Wait." Selina cut herself off after picking up something in the inflection of his voice, "The way you said that. Are you saying you don't suck?"

'Oh boy,' Max thought to himself, choosing to take a seat on the counter in his kitchen as he regaled Selina with just what he'd been up to since his bout of self-realization after his run-in with Tally Man. If anyone was going to know, it might as well be the woman who set him unto a life of crime in the first place, "Well I spent most of the time learning some stuff."

_(Flashback – A Few Days Ago)_

"_That's it kid. Ya can't kick or punch from that close, but just remember the knees and elbows."_

'_I'm a liar,' Null thought to himself as he continued to work with Wildcat in the alley outside of a gym near Battery Park. The man seemed entirely content being a standing dummy for him to target with everything he'd been learning over the last few weeks, 'I'm a damn liar, and I'm lying to a superhero.'_

_But it was so worth it._

_Wildcat was one of the finest boxers in the world, period. It was his main tried and true method of dealing with absolutely anything if he had the choice, but it wasn't the only thing that he knew. Under his belt were several different martial arts styles, and he knew enough about them to not only teach them, but to teach separate chunks of them to a single person in a method that allowed him to use bits from whatever he gave them._

_His reasoning for teaching Null the way he did was simple. _

_While Null didn't particularly fancy any style, he used all of his limbs routinely to attack. Training him to box didn't mean much if he still chose to throw kicks that he never learned how to do properly, so he wound up teaching him a wild mishmash of what the man could fit together._

_The result was no single particular fighting style in the formal sense, but enough of three or four others to have one of his own. One that he could actually add to if he came across something that worked for what he was doing, so even after he left he could get better without having to learn something brand new from the beginning._

_It had been one hell of a two week training camp. Sleep and eat during the day, exercise from sunset until the meeting time with Wildcat, suit up and then train all night._

_Fortunately, any crime that occurred was not handled by said vigilante. He had been steadfast in his stance that he was retired, and because the trouble wasn't near his neck of the woods in upper Manhattan._

_Along the way he'd learned plenty about Wildcat as well. _

_What was most alarming was just how long he'd been in the game. From the things the guy told him, he was at least over 70 years old and didn't look a day over 35. Apparently he had some sort of limited kind of immortality, something or another about nine lives, that translated over into his longevity._

_All of it made Null wonder if he'd ever meet anyone in the same boat as him that didn't have some sort of superpower or super-amenity available to them that made taking part in such a life convenient._

"_I can't wait to quit," Null muttered to himself, taking a seat and catching his breath after a particularly grueling session. He was in good shape, and the suit made doing everything that much easier, but Wildcat was wearing him out, "One day soon."_

"_Kid," Wildcat said, shaking his head, the visible portion of his face affixed in a knowing smile, "…Ya ain't gonna retire. Ain't no such thing as retirin'," He reached out and tapped Null on his head, "Once ya put on that hood, gave yourself that name, and started fightin', ya can't stop. Somethin' or another won't ever let ya."_

_Null shook his head, "No. When I'm done, I'm done. Let somebody else that actually wants it get a piece of this craziness. It's for the fucking birds."_

_Wildcat let out a bark of laughter before slugging Null on the shoulder, "Back in the day, I was only supposed to do this long enough to clear my name. That was way back when you were a twinkle in the twinkle of your granddaddy's eye."_

_From the wrinkles on his face, Wildcat didn't look much older than in his thirties. From what he was saying, he'd have to have been pushing well past his nineties, "…How old are you?"_

"_Older than you'd think or believe kid," Wildcat said, throwing an arm around the shoulder of his temporary charge, "And there are still people way older than me that look even better."_

"_That isn't saying too much," Null jibed, "From what I can see of your face you've got the mileage of an old leathery boot on it."_

_A growl came from Wildcat before he spaced himself away from Null and put his dukes up, a smirk on his face, "Alright brat. Since ya seem recovered enough to shoot that mouth off, let's see what ya got."_

_Null held back a curse. Saying what he had said meant that he was about to get more free-sparring, which was basically an excuse for Wildcat to kick the crap out of him and nitpick his fighting at the same time._

(End Flashback)

"Mmm, so you trained with Wildcat," Selina said, sprawled out on the couch, an appreciative look on her face at Max's ability to net himself a temporary tutor, "There aren't many more people you could have found that are better at straight-up fighting than him," He trained her after all, but that was another story, "…Man bangs like a loaded freight train too." She added, relishing the grimace that crossed Max's face.

"Okay, first of all," Max made a quick false retching noise before talking again, "Second, you know him?"

Selina nodded, "It's pretty common. A lot of superheroes and villains know each other, or at least of each other. You probably could have gotten him to teach you something out of costume if you knew who he was outside of the suit and dropped my name."

Instead of hiding that he was an aspiring thief and letting the man think that he was a hero-in-training. Wonderful. So he didn't even have to put his future neck at risk to get what he needed, but wound up doing so regardless because of circumstances. There seemed to be a pattern forming there.

But no excuses. That would always be the thing. No excuses for why anything occurred in his life, especially when it had been something well within his control.

Sitting next to Selina on the lone couch in his home, Max leaned off to the side to relax after his trip back from New York, "Anything else you didn't tell me? Like, does Superman or The Flash fill in whenever Batman's out of town or something?"

"No, remember he has the two kids and Nightwing for that."

He had of course been being facetious when he'd asked that question, but of course it had a legitimate answer to it, "Right. I forgot."

"Oh, cheer up Maxie. I didn't just come for the gloom and doom warning. I'm actually here to help," Selina told him before holding out a manila folder teasingly in front of his face, "If I say I got you a job, would you take it? It was sent my way, but eh. I'm not really feeling it."

That, and she didn't like the client. She knew who it was even if it hadn't been marked. The employer wasn't her type; too likely to get back at her if she felt a fleeting need to cut out on the deal in exchange for a better one. But if she turned it down outright, that would be trouble. If Max filled the spot instead, even if he failed, he would be the one to bear the brunt of the client's displeasure at the failed mission.

If it went well and good came of it for the young man, Selina would say that he owed her one down the line. If it went badly and he came back pissed, with a new set of problems, and _not_ in a body bag, because that part was important, she would say that he could consider the pains he'd gone through for the mission she'd pawned off onto him as payment for her training.

He was tough. He could take it.

"And of course, the pay is all yours."

The second she said that, she knew she'd made a mistake from the way Max's face changed, "All mine? No finder's fee for you?" He asked, skepticism lacing his voice.

Selina pursed her lips in thought before she wound up killing her own, "How much did you make in New York?" It was an instant bullseye from the grimace he gave her, "You're too careful to do this for a living."

If Max had have taken the risk of trying to steal while he was being trained by Wildcat, he certainly would have run the risk of attracting the ultra-physical hero's ire, but he wouldn't have found himself caught in a position where he had nothing to show for his nearly month-long trip. He had much less than he'd originally left with. Between food and paying for a place to stay, he had well under two-thousand dollars after everything was all said and done.

Kickass fighting moves were cool and everything, that much the aspiring thief couldn't put a price on, and they would help to make him a lot less dead later on down the line, but as it stood, he needed money now. Again.

Selina was dangling a job right in front of his face. Nothing would come her way that wasn't worth the pay, and she was giving it to him.

There was a catch, and he knew she wasn't doing this out of the goodness of her heart even though there wasn't anything on the surface to spook him, but it was a Selina job. Trouble aside, the kind of money that was obviously going to come with that couldn't be scoffed at by someone who was running low on funds.

Tenatively, Max felt the need to accept what was being handfed to him, "It's just a theft?"

"Just a theft," Selina parroted to him soothingly, "As if I'd give you any of my bounty work. Find your own if that's what you're after," She masked her absolute need for him to take the job with a defiant detachment to it, like she had bigger fish to fry elsewhere.

That simply was not the case. If he turned it down, she would be taking it. She really wouldn't have had much of a choice.

But he was thinking too hard about it to turn it down. The more he thought it over, the better the chance at a sweet payday would sound, and he needed it. The skepticism quickly drained out of the boy's expression and Selina grinned. He wasn't going to back down.

Good old Max. He was really too good to be bad.

XxX

(Mid-Gothan City – Eastern End of Sprong River – Miller Harbor)

The first weekend back in Gotham City, and he had a job he didn't particularly want. But money was money, and something this clandestine would definitely pay more than stealing the crap he'd been lifting before.

Cargo harbors were creepy places in general. At night, they became that much more unnerving. They were also great places for illicit acts.

Lots of space filled with nothing but storage containers. A maze-like setup throughout. Empty service streets leading to separate areas and warehouses that were desolate at night. It was a good place for criminals to congregate.

Granted, there was still Batman to contend with, and he knew full well everything logical about harbor areas that the criminals did. Those that chose to go there anywhere to ply their trade were either relying on the law of averages, or they were a cut above the average street goon in some manner.

Without a clue as to who his client was to be, Null approached the meeting area dressed in his full suit, the camouflage of the actual outfit changed to suit the environment. Lying atop a stack of metal crates, he let loose a breath as his equipment changed colors and patterns to match it.

He'd gotten there as early into the night as he could and remained there for hours, just waiting. It was all for good reason.

The plan was simple enough; get the drop on whomever it was that was doing the hiring. So at least if nothing else came of things, he had that much of a leg up on them. If it was a trap, he would be there first to spring one of his own on the ambusher.

As he overlooked the scene, he swore he could see a figure trying to blend in with the dark nearby. He trained his eyes on who or whatever it was and tried to make out definite features, but as he focused in he felt something disturb the field of static that always seemed to be around him.

A slight static shock was his only warning that something was nearby, right behind him. Twisting from his belly to his back, he turned over with a kick that knocked a pair of hands holding onto some sort of weapon away from aiming at him. In the same motion he rolled up to his feet, ready for whatever was after him.

He was just going to pretend that the 'whatever' wasn't holding a sword. But she was, and it was definitely a 'she'.

The would-be attacker was a teenage girl with long white hair, wearing a half-mask that covered the upper portion of her face above her mouth. Half orange and half black, it also lacked an opening for her left eye. Her outfit was a form-fitting black getup with no sleeves and vertical openings at the hips. Any skin that might have been exposed by such attire was covered by a sort of silver armor underneath that vaguely resembled chain mail. She wore orange gloves, boots, and a belt that more than likely had weapons and combat equipment attached.

Something about that rang familiarly in his head, but he overlooked it just as soon as it came to him.

Because the most important thing was the sword strapped to her back. A sword that she happened to be wielding at the moment.

She took a slash at him, but Null forewent trying to retaliate in the slightest, taking a swan dive right off of the stacked containers down to the paved ground. He landed in a roll, avoiding the downward stab the girl took when she jumped after him in pursuit.

The girl grinned when he rolled in the direction of another set of containers and worked to corral him, back-to-wall for an easy kill. Max let her back him up with cuts in his direction. Anything she wanted as long as she didn't hit him.

His back touched a wall and the girl instantly struck, viciously stabbing forward at him, only to be surprised when she not only missed and stabbed through the container, but when her target's feet stood directly on her weapon. Looking up at the rest of his body, she saw his hands somehow sticking flat to the wall, holding him up.

Null kicked at her head, but she pulled her sword out and dodged simultaneously. Planting his feet on the container, he jumped right at her like a missile.

"I can see right through you!" The girl shouted, taking a killer swing at him as if she were a batter and he were the ball. It was an easy attack to go through with, especially when she'd already foreseen that scenario the moment she moved away from him, "Die!"

What she hadn't foreseen was missing by the slimmest of margins. With inhuman body control and reflexes, Null twisted his body underneath her slash and hit her with a full-body tackle that he heard drive the air right out of her. He shouldn't have been so satisfied with the knowledge that he was hurting a girl, but chivalry stopped when she pulled out a sword.

The move didn't seem to do that much either, as the dangerous teenage girl simply brought her knees in and planted her feet at his hips once they hit the ground. She tilted her body back as she pushed her legs outward and sent him flying.

With another container in his flight path, Null flipped enough to land with his feet on the vertical surface and cling in place. Twisting on his toes, he set himself back and planted a hand on it for better positioning to look down, "You know I'm not Catwoman, right? I don't have boobs or anything," He said, patting his own chest for emphasis as a joke, "See? You can stop swinging that thing at me anytime you want."

The girl chuckled in response, but didn't approach him to attack again, "Are you scared? Most nerds would think a girl with swords was hot."

Wait, what? "…Did you just call me a nerd?"

"No, you're a really cool guy," Sarcasm detected and duly noted, "And I know you're not Catwoman. That's why I'm trying to murder you."

Null opened his mouth to unleash a profanity-laden diatribe against the crazy bitch with the sword, but found his voice caught in his throat upon hearing another one that gave him chills and caused any latent survival instincts he had to kick in.

"The message sent was intended for one person only," A serious, dangerously astute-sounding man said, attracting not only Null's attention but the girl's as well, "And that person wasn't you, whoever you are."

The sight of the speaker almost made him come undone and fall from the wall.

A man who wore a black bodysuit that seemed to be made of the same kind of armored material that the girl wore. On his head was a hard mask/helmet colored half orange and half black with only one eye-hole. His frame was adorned with orange harnesses and belts. As a result, the man was armed to the teeth with blades and firearms, notably one large broadsword on his back.

"Deathstroke," Null said aloud. It wasn't of his own volition. He thought it, and simply could not muster the mental faculties to filter himself.

On the list of people that Selina had run him through containing people he may or may not interact with as far as how to deal with them if he came across them, Deathstroke the Terminator was on the very short list of people that she told him without exceptions to refrain from crossing.

He'd come from the direction of the shadowy person Null had been observing earlier. That caused Null to make an observation on his current situation, "…You were just hanging out and waiting for her to kill me, weren't you?" He'd been bait to make sure Null's attention was kept on him while Ravager scoured the area to actually find him.

Deathstroke crossed his arms and looked up at the wall-bound thief, "I realized when you arrived that you weren't Catwoman. I asked for a professional and she sent me a boy, so I planned on sending her back a corpse," The girl made to make good on that threat until Deathstroke cut her off, "Ravager, stop."

She froze midstep before she could attempt to pounce on Null, "But you just said-."

"I said I _planned_ on it. Past tense," Deathstroke said, "Then he fought back, and I got to see some of what he can do. He didn't do a bad job of sneaking his way here before you could find him, and while the thief's role in this mission isn't expected to fight… he did better than I would have figured he should have."

The last part was verbally pointed directly at Ravager, who instead of responding to him stood for glaring murderously at Null. She in turn got one right back in return from him. He wasn't going to take that now of all times. He didn't care if she had a sword or was Deathstroke's… whatever she was.

Deathstroke ignored the two and mused to himself aloud, "So now what to do with you?" He asked rhetorically, "I could just-," He pulled his assault rifle out with one hand and Null had a red dot trained on his eye before he'd even thought to respond. That kind of quickness was insane, "-But that would be a waste, when I can actually use you."

Yes. All he needed was a person to do the actual infiltration and theft. The boy wouldn't be expected to fight, and from the short skirmish with Ravager he could clearly move as needed. Also, it would be easier to ensure he behaved and didn't double-cross him in some manner the way the chance always existed that Catwoman would. He seemed to know the name of Deathstroke, and the reputation that came with it resonated with him.

"Well, let's do it then," Null said, trying to get past the tension in his chest at having an automatic weapon trained on him at the hands of one of the baddest men on the planet. This was the entrance to the rabbit hole, and once he went down it he would have a hard time ever getting back out again.

He was being hired, and this was all a part of the interview process, just like with any other job.

Only this wasn't mopping up for a 24/7 convenience store in the wee hours of the morning. It was working for an infamous mercenary; with some hostile girl protégé of his who barely seemed able to reign in her utter disdain for him, probably because she couldn't kill him in less than two minutes. It was a high-pressure situation if Null had ever seen one.

And when you were alone and nervous, the best way to hide it was to ignore the danger with snark.

Turning his head to Ravager, a grin was clearly evident under Null's hood as he looked down at her, "Hey! It looks like we're gonna be partners. So how about a team name? My name is Null, and yours is Ravager… and I've got no idea what to make out of that."

"Can I stab him?" Ravager asked Deathstroke, "Just through the shoulder to make him shut up until tomorrow?"

"Why would stabbing me make me shut up? That'd make me yell," Null pointed out, "The shit would hurt."

*BANG!*

The single shot from the assault rifle punched a hole in the metal, right next to Null's head. He didn't flinch. If he'd moved, he probably would have gotten his brains splattered all over the place. Deathstroke had barely even moved. If his arm had even felt any sort of recoil from the gun, Null hadn't seen it.

"Children. Play nice now," Deathstroke said in a chiding tone of voice, "Ravager, don't kill him. Boy, don't make her kill you. I'm expecting the two of you to hold up your ends of the job. Failing wouldn't be advisable for either of you."

Null could only think that this was going to be one long weekend.

Life was certainly unexpected.

* * *

**This will be the trip and fall that sets our… hero? Yeah, let's go with hero. This will be the trip and fall that sets out hero into a world that he will progressively find more and more impossible to sever his ties to. From this point forward, things will get deeper and deeper. More and more heroes and villains will find ways to intertwine him into the tapestry so to speak.**

**People from commonplace circumstances need not find themselves in the world of heroes and villains. It tends to leave its mark on them, one way or another.**

**We're done for now folks. Kenchi out.**


	4. The Longest Weekend

Disclaimer: I do not own anything DC. But that's just fine! I'll start my own comic company, you'll see!

…

…No, not really. That's… that's a terrible idea. That'd be the equivalent of trying to stop an oncoming train with my bare hands.

…Forget all of that then. Forgive my previous outburst.

**Chapter 4: The Longest Weekend**

* * *

Slade Wilson, otherwise known as Deathstroke, really was the man.

Inside of Gotham City, he had access to several safehouses paid for with his money under the names of people with no criminal records whatsoever. Apparently he had places like that all over, in most big cities in the country that he would operate in.

There was something said for being the best in your line of work.

The blinds of all of the windows were closed at all times. For all intents and purposes it was just a normal place. Deathstroke had rules to be followed at all times while in the building. No rooms anyone stayed in could be around any windows as they needed to be reserved to maintain the ruse of the building being a normal place. That left only a few actual rooms to use around the middle of the floors.

It made for a pretty boring Saturday for the most part. The mission wasn't until that night, so Friday afternoon Max gathered his things for a short stay and arrived at the place, making sure that he went and checked in as Null.

He wasn't going to take his stuff off until he was safely at home again by the end of the mission. Not a chance. The last thing he needed was someone like either his employer or his daughter memorizing his face and knowing what he looked like. Similarly, not being completely outfitted and ready for anything at all times would have been foolish. Even if he'd established a working relationship with them, they were all still criminals.

Well… Deathstroke was more of a mercenary than a criminal. He did actual hired work for money. But the things he did were oftentimes illegal.

Don't trust anybody… at least when you could help it.

Until the job came to a conclusion Max couldn't let his guard down. His identity probably meant nothing to them for all he knew, but it meant his future to him.

He left his door open as he did sit-ups on the floor of his room in case someone needed to get to him. No one did, but someone did pass by his room. He stopped mid-motion and spared a wave for the girl he'd fought that he now knew was Deathstroke's daughter, 'A wave? Really? No 'what's up' or anything? Ugh. I suck.'

She just glared at him and stood in his doorway wearing civs for the time being instead of her costume. What was it with girls and traipsing around in little black shorts? It was hard to remember that she was crazy when she was so damned fine, "You had to pick this floor didn't you?"

"There's three floors," Null said, getting up from where he'd been exercising out of boredom now that he'd been given a new stimuli to assuage it, "The first floor's the lobby; that's nothing but a front. I figured the top floor was Deathstroke's, and I'm not going up there. So that left the second floor, where all of the rooms are."

Ravager shook her head, letting her white locks sway, revealing the patch over her left eye. Deathstroke had one over his right. Coincidence? God, he hoped so.

As she left, he made to follow her, seeing as how there was absolutely nothing else going on and as far as the pecking order went he felt much more confident going to her about anything than Deathstroke, "So is there food in that kitchen I saw here last night, because I didn't get breakfast today. Are you hungry?" He didn't think he could head back out and get something at a whim.

Ravager let out an annoyed sigh and didn't bother turning to face him, "Let's get something straight. You're not a friend; you're a hired thief," Ravager said curtly, "Make it past two weeks, I _might_ learn your name; until then, you're a bullet shield with legs."

Null watched her walk ahead of him without breaking stride for a moment and made a claw gesture to her back as she left him where he stood, "Rawr. Jesus," It wasn't as if he expected to forge a long-lasting friendship or something foolish like that, but was it too much to ask for some cordiality?

On the other hand, she had tried and failed to kill him less than 24 hours ago. And if a person named 'Ravager' was actually nice to him, he probably would have been paranoid the entire time and figured that it was a trap. There was something about her bitchiness that actually set him at ease.

"Name's Null by the way."

That last remark came with the warning sensation of a disturbance in the air around him just before they both entered a room, Null's warning to lean his head out of the way of a quick slash of a sword that took a chunk out of the doorframe. Once again, Ravager didn't turn, even to see if she'd taken his head off. That was infuriating. He wasn't even worth checking if she'd killed him.

Null sneered at her, the blood streaming down his cheek from the nick that Ravager had given him in warning, "Okay, you've got a point. We might never swap greeting cards, but let's get one thing straight _Baby Deathstroke_," He jabbed, risking an actual fight with her, "There's something I'm more afraid of than dying."

The 'Baby Deathstroke' reference stopped her cold, but what followed it got her attention, prompting Ravager to turn around and glare at him with her one eye, "And what would that be?"

"Living as nothing. Less than nothing really," Null said, a haunted look in his eyes as he walked right up to her, danger close to the sword, "Winding up on the street, people won't look through you as you pass like they do to everybody else. They won't even look at you at all. I've seen it."

And once you were down that low, unless you were _really_ lucky, you stayed there.

"You've got… Deathstroke," Null continued with a shrug, "That's great. I don't have any resources to pick myself back up, or anyone to go to if that happens."

His so-called mentor Selina was pretty much the definition of an opportunist, so she sure as hell wouldn't help him if he was in need. The guy that taught him how to better fight hand-to-hand, Wildcat, didn't know he was a thief, and he was dreading the fallout of whenever the ultra-tough hero did learn of that bit of news.

His parents weren't around, and any family he did have was across the sea, if they even knew about him at all. He was effectively alone, and failure meant his worst fear coming to life.

"Every payday puts a little more distance between me and the curb outside. It buys me a little bit more time to come up with an actual idea for my life," Null said, grabbing her sword and moving it away from her as he walked into the room, finding it to be a small common area, "I'm not doing this forever. I'm gonna get out. And when I do, I'm gonna be free to do whatever I want."

"That's a pretty mundane fear," Ravager said, calming down and turning her attention to clearing Null's blood off of the blade, "What's weird is that you told me about it at all."

"Well, it's something that's in my power to control. It's up to me in the end, s'not like you or anybody else can really do much about that," Null explained, wiping the blood from the gash on his face and taking a seat away from the computer. He hoped he didn't have to get that stitched up, "The only reason I told you is just so that you know, no matter how scary something really is, if you give me the option of whatever you're threatening or what I was talking about, for right now I'll take the threat in a heartbeat."

It was an entirely selfish fear, but Null was a selfish young man. There wasn't any altruistic reason for doing what he did as a thief. There wasn't some hatred of the current system of the world that made him feel no need to follow it. He just stole because as a teenager he thought it was the best way to keep himself in the money.

He couldn't sing, dance, act, rap, play an instrument, or play a sport. There was no reality TV show out looking for someone him to let him become famous for being an idiot, and stealing beat working for minimum wage for the rest of his life.

If he had to interact with Deathstroke the Terminator and his semi-psychotic daughter in order to do that, so be it. As long as he didn't have to kill anyone to fulfill his deals, he felt that he would be fine. He honestly wasn't sure he had the guts to do something like that.

"As long as we're here and not working," Ravager started to say as she took a seat at a computer terminal and turned it on, "You might as well call me Rose."

"You're telling me your name?" The thought seemed foreign to Null. His name was the last real defense he had. It was the last thing to go before someone could really get to the crux of him.

Rose shrugged in her chair as she relaxed and began looking through the files on the computer for study purposes, "I don't give a fuck if you know it or not. Rose Wilson _is_ Ravager. Slade Wilson _is_ Deathstroke," She said. Her identity meant nothing to her. Everyone attached to it was dead anyway, "Not like we have to worry about family. We're all that's left of it."

Slade had children with another woman who was his wife, and all of them were dead, wife included. Rose's own mother raised her out of a brothel until… things of a villainous, murder-ish nature ended that little slice of life.

Null felt a reason for whatever objective to try and establish some sort of common ground.

"My parents emigrated here when I was little and became second-rate scientists. They died and left me with a mountain of debt," Null pointed out. Not that he didn't love his parents, but they were what they were, and sugarcoating what happened wouldn't have made his situation any less real, "But they racked up that debt making something I can actually use to try and fix things."

Well, he did have a bit of an accent. Rose figured that if she really cared, she could probably guess what country his parents had come from within five tries (South Africa as her first guess) but it didn't matter as much as the fact that she imagined a challenge had been cast to her. One she knew she could win.

A grim smirk came to Rose's lips, "Last year, I murdered my defenseless uncle after he killed my mother and my adopted family, and tried to kill me. First kill by the way."

"I'm probably not gonna win a game of 'Who Had the Most Fucked Up Last Six Months' with you, so I'll just say that sucks," Null said honestly, only getting a grunt from the trained killer, "Still, don't you want to go out, and do, I don't know, something? Anything… not stupid-dangerous?"

"There's no getting out, and I don't want to," Rose said with an incredulous laugh, "Even if I did one day, and I could drop things no questions asked, there's no way that would ever work. When you start, it doesn't end. I'm too screwed up anyway."

Null leaned over and looked at her seriously, "Well, you're kind of aggressive and nasty, but you could be worse," He told her, "You don't seem crazy when you're not being stabby," She wasn't anything he didn't think he could deal with anyway.

She was quick to try and break him of that line of thinking.

Rose tapped her eyepatch, "I did this to myself," She took in Null's silence as a signal that her point had been proven, and she no longer felt like studying for the mission in his presence, choosing to get up and leave, "Sharing time is over. Make sure you're ready to work later."

For a second she felt like he was someone she might have been able to talk to, but that washed away the moment that she remembered that he wasn't a soldier. He was just some guy. Some white-bread, picket-fence guy.

He wouldn't understand the first thing about her, and honestly, she barely knew enough to explain herself to anyone else anyway.

Null kept his mouth shut and simply watched Rose leave the room, even as she left him with one final word, "And for your information, I'm _always_ stabby."

Still not saying a word, he watched her walk away, his eyes involuntarily drifting below her waistline until she was out of his sight, "Maybe..." He lingered on the 'e', thinking aloud until shaking his head, "Nah. She'd probably kill me or cut something off after we were done."

And if she wouldn't, he figured Deathstroke would. The man didn't seem like the doting daddy type from how they interacted, but the chance that he wouldn't have cared wasn't worth the risk involved. It would kind of suck to lose his virginity only to be executed by his employer immediately afterwards, or during.

…Wow. Six different scenarios had just run through his head of him taking Rose into his room to try and shed his v-card, and possibly hers as well. Of note, none of them involved him removing his hood either. That was how unrealistic his outlook had been.

All of this was making him pretty sick in the head, wasn't it?

XxX

(Later That Evening – Sunset)

Slade, his daughter, and their temporary hire were situated within view of where the man would be instigating the distraction that would bring Batman out to face him. From a darkened window inside a partially used office building shared by multiple small companies, there was a small place where he could aim through. Half a mile away, there was a clear view of a museum where a gala was just now beginning.

The entire front area of the building would be filled with Gotham's elite, including many people that would have been possible targets. Honestly, some of them could have been, as he had been sent contracts for a good number of them. But Slade didn't do everything sent to him. The final decision for who lived and who died was his, and money wasn't his only criteria for taking jobs.

Having made his own preparations for starting the fireworks, Slade put on his mask, covering his eyepatch, white hair, and weathered features before heading up to the roof where Rose and Null were preparing as well.

Reaching the roof, Rose sat on the corner, overlooking the city streets below, checking over her weapons and equipment. Null sat against the wall outside of the stairwell, limbering himself up just in case flexibility and acrobatics were needed. They weren't speaking, apparently both focused on the mission.

It probably felt weird for Null to be out in what technically counted as daylight. But it would be dark out within a matter of minutes, by the time they got underway actually, so it shouldn't have been too terribly offsetting.

"Listen up," Slade said, deciding that it was time to get to work, "You both know what you're doing. Ravager, you're first diversion. Null, you're the real manpower on this assignment," Ravager scoffed at that and Null sneered up at her but they didn't gripe at each other. Good, because it wasn't the time. He continued on with the point he'd been making with their new guy, "You cannot afford to be caught. Whether this succeeds or fails is on you."

Slade wouldn't have put that kind of responsibility in the hands of someone like him, but if he did it himself and let Null be one of the distractions instead, it would have more than likely had less of a chance of working out.

Null had no misconceptions about where they were. The second this thing kicked off, he knew full well who would be coming, "And _he_ won't figure out that you're running interference for somebody else to do some robbing?" Someone like him for instance, who would NOT be winning any exchanges with Batman. He hadn't run into him yet and he was sort of hoping he'd be able to keep that streak going.

"I don't steal," Deathstroke said simply and to the point. He fought and he killed. He was a soldier, "If I make the attack on an important enough figure, Batman _will_ focus in on me. If he thinks for a moment that I've got someone doing something else he won't expect you. He'll turn his attention to Ravager. From there you'll have the window to take what I want and make your way to the rendezvous point."

"And you can get away?" Null wasn't sure why he was supposed to care. The question only seemed to attract Deathstroke's eye to him, which was the last thing he wanted. The less that man paid him any mind, the better.

"Whether I do or I don't doesn't really matter to you," In a perfect world, he'd wind up killing Batman. It wasn't the objective though, and if he wasn't able to by the time his younglings got away he had his ways to make himself scarce. Not that it should have mattered to the help, "If I don't, if Ravager doesn't, but you do with the item, you will still be paid," He didn't tell Null just how that would occur, but Deathstroke didn't seem to be the type to suffer backstabbing or backstab during an actual business deal. The man took professional work deadly serious, "The most important thing is that _you_ make it, boy."

He said nothing else and departed back downstairs, having already explained Null and Ravager's parts in the plan before ever making their way to the starting area.

Null let out a breath that he'd been holding and bounced in place on his toes, shaking his shoulders out. He was shaken up, but he was ready to go. Deep breaths and constant thoughts that he could pull this thing off were the things he took in.

As he mentally prepared, Rose got up and elbowed Null in the side to get his attention, simultaneously causing him to choke in the middle of one of his breaths.

"Here," The unmasked Rose said, trying to hand Null a handgun, "Just in case."

Catching sight of the weapon, he immediately took several long steps back, "I really shouldn't."

Oh for goodness sake.

Rose made up her mind that if he was one of those pansies too shaken to so much as touch a gun she was going to shoot him in the foot with it, "Anything could happen," She growled at him, "And you don't want the reason this goes bad to be that you don't have the stones to shoot a gun if you need to, dumbass. Trust me."

"I can shoot a gun," Null said, sounding markedly offended. He grew up in Gotham City on R-rated movies, M-rated video games. He wasn't a pro, but having a gun in his possession wasn't the problem. At least not philosophically, "I can't touch them while I'm in the suit. Not for too long. This suit generates electricity somehow. I don't know how yet. But eventually a constant charge going through the whole thing'll make the gunpowder in the clip go off."

Wow. Well that certainly changed things, didn't it?

Rose immediately put the gun away and took another few steps away from him, just in case the static she constantly felt in the air around him was another thing that would set something off, "That must have been a pain to find out about."

"I beat up some guy named Tally Man, who kept dropping his guns whenever he switched them out," Null explained, "I backtracked to try and take his stuff for myself, scavenging to pawn it later or something. I got about five blocks holding one that he hadn't run out of bullets with and BAM!"

Thank goodness the suit was durable. It probably kept him from blowing his fingers off. He didn't know if that would always happen whenever he held a loaded gun or if it had just been a one-time fluke, but if the possibility existed, why take the chance?

Rose laughed at his expense and flipped the gun around in her hand before returning it from whence it came, "Alright, no guns for you then 'Sparky'," She said, pulling her half-mask on over her head, "I guess you'll just have to be extra careful. If you run into someone willing to stop you, they might not be as nice as I was."

Her? Nice? Right.

"I don't make sparks," Null muttered before running forward and launching across a street to land on a rooftop on the other side only to hear sarcastic applause from Rose back where he'd started. He flipped her double birds and swiftly began to make his way to his target location. From here on out he'd be alone, at least that was the plan.

XxX

"Hmm…" Slade thought to himself, looking through the scope of his ranged rifle at the people he could clearly see on the other end, "Who's the most realistic target that I would go after?" Who could he shoot in the general direction of and make it seem as if they were actually his target.

Reporter? No.

Curator? No.

Hm, Bruce Wayne?

…

No. That was just reaching. That would just look like he was trying too hard. Going after Gotham's first son? And exactly what unsaid reasoning would he have for that?

The entire point wasn't to kill any of these lemmings. It was only to make it seem as if he were attempting to, and that only dumb luck saved them from getting their brains spilled all over the gala floor. Everyone would panic, scatter, and flee. From there he would pursue a little bit, just so that Batman would know the general area of where to look for him in.

That whole song and dance. For a brilliant man, some of Batman's actions could be very predictable. It was possible to lead him into things, the trouble truly came after that point. At times with Batman, it could be like the case of the dog chasing a car; after you caught up with it, then what did you do?

Such a thing wouldn't have mattered in this case though. Ravager would be his spotter from a distance in case she saw Batman coming before he did. Ravager and Null would remain in contact, and she would tell him when Batman was engaged with Slade as his sign to begin making his own move to steal.

Okay, who was standing _around_ Bruce Wayne? He'd scouted the arrivals, he'd managed to obtain the guest list and it didn't take much work to pull up profiles and images of all of them. He knew who should have been there, and he knew who would have made plausible stock for shooting.

Aha, and there he found a target. And if the S.T.A.R. Labs thing came up later, at least this could tie in to some sort of second non-existent motive. Now to make it glaringly obvious that someone was about to get shot.

Laser-dot sights on a high-caliber sniper rifle made aiming idiot-proof. It also made realizing that someone was being targeted idiot-proof. If people weren't paying enough attention to pick out the red dot on the guy in the center of the room talking to the most important person there, well that just said everything it needed to about Gotham's 'elite'.

XxX

(Inside of the Museum)

All for appearances. It was the only reason Bruce Wayne bothered ever coming to events like this. He had to keep up the playboy image, even if he really found it bothersome to do. Every second, minute, and hour he spent rubbing elbows with high society was another moment where the seedy underbelly of the city got the chance to prey on someone else without means.

But he had to smile, he had to look like he wouldn't rather be anywhere else.

Robin and Batgirl could handle whatever was going on around the city. If anything truly out of their league was happening, one or the other would know it, and they had explicit orders to inform him immediately if that were the case. Things should have been fine for the night, and if they weren't it would only take the most pitiful of excuses for him to get himself out of there.

A red dot suddenly appeared on the forehead of the director, and Bruce wasn't the only one who could see it judging by how a handful of people nearby had stopped to stare, mouths open.

It was one of the things that people saw happening all while it transpired, but felt powerless to prevent.

Bruce Wayne, or the identity Bruce Wayne donned when night fell, was not one of these people. His body simply moved and launched the director out of the way as a bullet passed through the window and out the back. There was hardly a sound, but everyone could guess what had just happened, and they scattered like deer.

Bruce jumped up and quickly made himself scarce, appearing to flee along with the rest of the crowd.

He would have been grateful to have a reason to leave, if it hadn't almost cost someone their life. He'd get the payback for that in just a little while.

XxX

(With Null – S.T.A.R. Labs)

The S.T.A.R. Labs facility in Gotham City specialized in weaponry.

With that piece of information available, it was kind of obvious as to why he wanted Null to steal from it. Mercenary, weapons, easy fit. What the hell did he want though? All he did was give him a flash drive and tell him that if he could reach the servers it would know what to download.

Way to take the complicated and interesting part out of his hands Mister Slade.

There wasn't any mystery to the second thing he wanted Null to steal for him, but Null didn't even want to think about that. It wouldn't be his responsibility after it left his hands, and Deathstroke didn't seem to be the type that would go out of his way to use something like that.

The chances that he would use the second thing anyway were very low. He rarely, if ever, had to deal with the person that sort of weapon would be used on.

"_Hey, Sparky,"_ He heard through the earpiece he had on under his hood, _"You're gonna want to get that ass moving right about now. The shooting started."_

"Right, right," Null said, cutting his way into the air duct on the roof. He'd broken the ventilation system already, so attempting to navigate it wouldn't be suicidal, and that route would invariably lead him right to the heart of the building's server rooms. If there was one place you wanted to keep the cold air pumping it was in a room filled with computers that had your company's data all over them.

"Ugh," Null grunted, squeezing his way through the narrow corridors of the vents, "You know, if you caught me just a few months later I'm not sure I could have done this," Even if he hadn't been somewhat bulking up through his training, he was a teenage boy and he was still growing naturally.

"_Which is yet another reason why Deathstroke wanted Catwoman."_ Ravager chimed in snarkily, _"Aside from her being A-plus value and you being… whatever you are. Oh God, you're not going to do something useless like get yourself stuck, are you?"_

"I'm fine now that I'm used to it, I think," Null told her, trying to remember the layout of the building from what he could remember of the map he'd gotten. With that in mind, his thoughts turned to the first phase of his mission, "Hey. Do you know what I'm stealing the specs on?"

"_Don't know, don't care, and neither should you. Don't ask questions that'll get you shot."_

Good advice. Max was not Catwoman, so he wasn't about to let curiosity kill him over something that probably wouldn't wind up affecting him at all after the mission ended, "You'd shoot me?"

"_No,"_ Ravager responded, much to Null's surprise. He figured pumping him full of lead would have been as easy as counting to three, _"I'm not big on the gunplay. If I had a choice I'd use a sword,"_ Oh, nevermind then. She'd still end him in a heartbeat if it was convenient.

Any response Null would have made died in his throat as he fell upside-down an opening to the lower floors. Of course. He'd crawled all the way to the corner end of the building. Of course there would be a shaft to the lower levels so that the air from the top could circulate.

Null grit his teeth and placed his hands out in front of himself in the cramped space to slow and eventually stop his fall with the electric cling. Turning his head to the lower end of the building he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw how close he'd come to actually hitting the bottom.

"_What was that Sparky? Did you set off an alarm?" _Ravager asked with a bit of bite to her voice,_ "Whatever happened better have killed you if you did."_

"I basically just fell fourteen stories and barely stopped myself from landing on my head," Null snapped at her, "Some consideration would be nice, ya bitch," He said as he lowered himself the rest of the way down and peered through the nearest vent. He was probably at the basement floor, "I'm going silent until I upload the info."

Working a vent off of the wall, Null squeezed out and hung by one hand from the opening to give himself a chance to scrutinize where he was. There were a lot of computer towers scattered through what looked to be more than one room, it was annoyingly cold, and there wasn't even a night guard skulking around from what he could see.

Yes, this was more than likely the right place. Thank you predictable ventilation structure plans for leading him straight to the place that most needed to be climate-controlled. One would think that a company focused on cutting-edge technology and scientific advancement in all fields imaginable would invest in a security system that covered all of their bases.

Null found the nearest USB port he could and stuck the jump drive in, hopping back when that seemed to bring it to life as it went into its programming to take what Deathstroke intended out of the info banks.

The entire room of servers seemed to come to life, whirring loudly as they prepared to give up the raw data that the drive had been looking for. It was louder than he thought it would be, having never been in a room full of running high-processing computers before.

But that time of data transfer was what happened to be the bane of his existence at the moment.

Null couldn't help but let out a quiet whimper when he saw that he'd have to wait for nearly ten minutes before he could eject the drive and leave, "Come on…" He whined to the inanimate object, "…I still have stuff to do."

XxX

(Elsewhere in Gotham City – With Deathstroke)

Any minute now. The longer the game of tag lasted with Batman trying to find Deathstroke's location, the longer Null had to do his job and get away with a headstart.

He had put away the scoped rifle, as from past meetings with Batman would indicate, he wasn't going to be able to zero in on him. Obsessing over killshots was more Deadshot's thing anyway, not his. He had no problem getting his hands dirty in a fight when he had to, and it could be assured that Batman would wind up forcing the issue.

Deathstroke chuckled at Batman's understated displeasure with his crashing of the gala for a contract kill, "Oh, Batman. And here I was thinking that this was about to be too easy," He said, pulling out a handgun to begin shooting.

Batman was as prepared for a fight as ever, and even with Deathstroke's superhuman physical abilities he was able to avoid getting the gun trained on him so that he could dodge. There were still shadows and ledges on the rooftop to use to his advantage.

Deathstroke did a fine job at keeping track of Batman's actual position to continue firing with a chance, but in the end, he was still firing a semi-automatic into the dark. Recognizing the type of gun being used, Batman counted down the amount of bullets that would be left in the magazine before throwing three batarangs after the number dropped to two.

Deathstroke shot two of them out of the air before blocking the last one with a sudden draw of his sword, "Hm. A fair try Batman," He said, reflexively ejecting the magazine.

"That's all you can really ask for," Batman said as he threw his first punch. Deathstroke dodged it to the outside and went for his sword only the moment his fingertips touched it, Batman reached for his bent elbow, his first attack a feint.

Deathstroke moved his hand away from the sword to keep Batman from trying to snap his arm, 'The kind of fight I expected,' He thought to himself, somewhat pleased that it wouldn't be a paint-by-numbers battle, 'I can't make a single mistake, and he knows he can't either, otherwise it's all over.'

It played out like a high speed game of chess.

Batman grabbed Deathstroke's wrist instead of his elbow as he moved his hand away from his sword, but a counter-clockwise turn of the mercenary's hand gave him the leverage to break his grip before it was locked. His hand lashed out to grab Batman around the neck, but he grabbed nothing but air.

The Dark Knight whipped around in an attempt to snap his special cape in Deathstroke's face for a stunning blow, but again this missed. Batman dropped a smoke pellet, but instead of using the smoke as cover to attack, he retreated upon catching sight of the metal of Deathstroke's sword.

His sudden quickdraw slash missed, forcing the two to move apart and square off momentarily before again engaging. Deathstroke's eye curled, a smirk on his face under the mask.

"As if I expected anything else," Deathstroke said, a morbid sort of amusement in his tone, "After all, I'd hate to have to break a sweat just for a first-round knockout."

XxX

(Meanwhile – With Ravager)

'Okay,' Ravager thought to herself as she tried to scan the rooftops from her position as watcher, 'Okay, Batman wouldn't let either of those kids he keeps with him fight Deatstroke, so that would mean that the kids that work with him should be somewhere where they'd know about the disruption,' Gotham's branch of S.T.A.R. Labs was too dangerous for someone like Batman to not keep constant, vigilant tabs on.

Null hadn't set off any alarms, but it was always good to count on the worst-case scenario occurring. They had planned for extra interference, had been counting on it actually.

If that were the case, it would only be a matter of time before they showed up, and it would be up to her to divert them and keep them from nosing around; even defeat them if possible. They knew nothing of Null's involvement, or what was supposed to be going on, and if they got anywhere close, a fight would distract them from their all-seeing crime-fighting tech that would let them realize that there was any sort of break-in going on.

She just had to find them first.

In her own humble opinion, she'd taken lessons from Deathstroke to heart, so if they were around they would need quite the stroke of luck to spot her before she spotted them.

*SHINK!*

The subtle noise of metal stabbing into wood attracted her attention in the dark of her cover underneath a water tower. The sound of soft beeping caused her to curse and quickly cut her way through the wood supports she'd concealed herself within.

Normally the explosives packed into what could fit in the middle of a Bat-a-rang wouldn't have been powerful enough to fell a structure with decent reinforcement, but in her haste to get away from the blast, Ravager had sliced through enough of it that the water tower was felled by the blast.

Metal clanged and crashed as water spilled out across the rooftop, dropping over the edge by the gallon. Ravager was barely able to keep her footing on the roof, and wasted no time in pulling out the handgun that she'd almost given to Null at the start of the mission.

Jaw locked in concentration she fired at two separate figures that moved across the roof swiftly.

The splitting of her attention proved to be her undoing, as one was able to get close enough to grab her gun arm. Feeling an attempt to break her elbow coming, Ravager twisted her body to alleviate the pressure and swung her sword with her free arm only to have someone stop it by blocking her forearm.

Occupying her right arm with a grappling technique was Robin, and stopping her swordplay was Batgirl. Both attacking at once. Well didn't she hit the jackpot?

"I hate using guns," Ravager muttered to herself, ejecting the magazine out of the bottom of the gun. With a quick pop of her knee, she knocked it into Robin's face and kicked him away with the same leg. Batgirl punched her in the face, but that was a small price to pay as far as Ravager was concerned as long as she got herself some space.

Tossing the firearm aside, Ravager licked away the blood before it could start trailing from her lip. Nonplussed at the stiff blow she'd received, she twirled her katana in her hand one time as she squared off with her pair of adversaries.

"Ravager," Robin said in curt greeting, "Wow, the starter pack version of Deathstroke. For once I actually get to fight someone that doesn't have at least five inches and fifty pounds on us," Batgirl rolled her eyes under her cowl and didn't say a word.

"Oh, didn't your bat-daddy ever sit you down and tell you?" Ravager said with a vicious grin, "Size isn't everything."

They weren't particularly prepared for Ravager to begin her move in a manner so alike to her father that they were caught off-guard by how quick she was. Her reflexes were frighteningly sudden, and both had to knuckle down to weather the first storm of her attack against the both of them.

Several strokes of the sword later, she found herself surprised by Robin suddenly bringing his collapsible bo staff to full length, almost catching her in the head between attacks. Ravager blocked a kick to the body from an opportunistic Batgirl, but found her legs swept thereafter by Robin's staff.

Growling in annoyance from her place on the ground, Ravager rose, trying to kneecap her enemies as she did so. Batgirl jumped away and hurled a bola, forcing Ravager to make a choice of over or under to avoid it. Taking the high ground, she leapt the over weapon intended to capture her, the perpetrator of the attack in her sights.

Ravager hadn't been at it for much longer than a year and she knew what she was doing to a deadly degree, but she was far from perfect. The holes in her game were hard to see through the ferocity and confidence that she fought with, but they were there. The way she fought was overwhelming at first, but after Robin and Batgirl had gotten somewhat used to her, the difficulties she presented began to decline sharply.

Robin read her body language as she took off and intercepted her in the air, hooking one of her arms under his armpit and grabbing hold of her head with his other hand. Sending her off-balance, Robin fell with her and slammed her right to the ground, with no way for her to protect her head.

"Hah-!" She saw black for a split-second after hitting the roof and lost feeling for longer, but she quickly came to and flew into a rage, thrashing to get enough mobility and leverage to make a move, "Get the fuck off of me!" She managed to roll both herself and Robin so that she was the one looming over him. Twirling her katana by the handle, she held it for a downward stab but got her bell rung again by a kick to the head from Batgirl.

Robin stood back up and cursed himself for losing the advantage in a scenario where he could have possibly brought Deathstroke's daughter down. It wasn't that he'd gone easy, it was just that she'd turned into a beast when she'd gotten hurt, "She's not going to stop unless we knock her out."

Batgirl nodded mutely. The way she'd moved when Robin had her arm trapped, she would have dislocated it just from how she'd been moving if she hadn't been so strong that she could move him from where she'd been on her belly, "She would have seriously hurt herself just to get out of that hold," She was clearly the 'coyote chewing its own leg off to escape a trap' type, which wasn't good.

Even if Batgirl had managed to trap her with a bola, would it really have kept her from rampaging until she got herself free or did severe harm to herself? Hell, she probably would have just found a way to cut herself free, then she would have flown into a rage.

Holding her head, Ravager kept her sword up, keeping it between them and her, keeping them from outright going right for her and trying to finish the fight. Things weren't exactly going well. She'd undertaken her portion of the mission without question, as Deathstroke would have had no room for dissent in any aspect of his plan. Even so, she had been entirely confident that with what she could do, handling Batgirl and Robin was entirely within her range of ability.

"_Hey, what's happening!?"_ The signal between Null and Ravager was crystal clear, and he was entirely able to hear everything on her end. If a pigeon had taken a crap on a water tower he probably would have been able to tell from the sound, so the noises of fighting were so evident to his ears it might as well have been happening all around him.

"Don't worry about it and finish your job," Ravager hissed at him over their connection, "This was always going to be what was supposed to happen."

"_I'm done. I'm on the way out now,"_ Null said,_ "Start running damn it."_

He knew the sounds of someone getting roughed up when he heard it, and if it had been the other side getting outclassed by Ravager he was fairly certain he'd have heard a sword cutting through something fleshy by now. Unfortunately, at the moment his opinion was on the same level as that of the nearest brick wall as far as Ravager was concerned.

Ever since she'd taken the plunge down the rabbit hole that was being Deathstroke's apprentice, Rose Wilson didn't take getting beaten by anyone lightly, and as far as she was concerned this was far from over. Her mentality wasn't very keen on retreating at a time like that. It carried the air of defeat with it, and defeat simply was not an acceptable outcome.

Two-on-one or not, she just wouldn't have been satisfied without dropping at least one of them before she left.

Only now, the good guys weren't content with letting the bad girl run roughshod all over them.

As they attacked her, there was only so much she could do trying to keep them at bay with swings of her sword. She couldn't focus on both at the same time as they buzzed around her like stinging insects, taking turns picking away with quick shots that got them in and out before she could skewer them or slice them up.

By themselves, the padding punches and kicks Batgirl was using wouldn't have hurt very much, but the constant pressure and steady pummeling quickly began adding up along with jabs from Robin's staff.

The two heroes were patient. Even as Ravager tried to move the battle across the rooftop to more potentially advantageous areas, they kept a fine circle around her, constantly moving and swarming, making sure above all else that she never had both of them in clear sight ever again.

'Tim was right,' Barbara thought, taking note of the thoroughly thrashed daughter of the world's best assassin. As dangerous as she was, her options and methods of response were limited, 'She's not used to being outnumbered by people on this level. She didn't know how to change her tactics to adapt.'

Sometimes it was scary just how good Robin was at analysis. Of course, having seen her in action a few times, he obviously remembered enough to put together a plan after a handful of exchanges.

Her back heel against the edge of the rooftop, Ravager fell to a knee, blood trailing from her mouth. She was certain that when she took off her mask and costume she'd find a score of ugly black bruises. Batman's kids played just as rough as she figured they would have for people trained by the man who had taught them.

The grip on her sword tightened, remembering how Deathstroke had told her how… disappointed he'd been when she hadn't been good enough to kill her half-brother Jericho. What she'd done afterward to prove that she was loyal. That she was his daughter.

It hadn't been that long ago. Failing again wasn't an option.

"You're gonna have to kill me if you want me to stop," Ravager said with a bit of a sick grin, "Because if I lose, and you take me alive, I might as well be dead to Deathstroke."

Even if he was a cold bastard (to say the absolute least), he was her father, and he was literally the only family she had.

As she thought about how the next attack she'd be waging would end for her, she saw something slowly moving almost parallel to the roof, right behind Robin and Batgirl. She thought she was seeing things from too many hits on the head, until she saw a pair of hands sprout and grab onto one of Batgirl's ankles.

Apparently, it hurt, because she let out a surprised cry before turning to try and stomp on whatever it was.

An opening. With only one opponent definitively free to focus on her, and with his attention averted at least temporarily, Ravager leapt at Robin and kicked at him, getting it blocked but knocking him away far enough to finally separate him and Batgirl. That put an effective end to their tandem attack against her.

Speaking of whom, she was quickly able to free herself with a handful of kicks to the source of the grabbing hands, and jumped away as it rose up from the surface of the roof, the suit of the person changing back to its normal green hue instead of taking on the complete appearance of the roof's color and visual texture, "Null?"

But he was too mentally preoccupied to offer her any sort of reply at the moment.

'What the hell?' Null thought to himself, trying very hard not to grab his head after the bunch of kicks that he'd taken in it from Batgirl, 'That was enough to screw up somebody like Copperhead, but it couldn't get to her?'

He'd human-tased her, and _had_ to let go after three seconds or she would have knocked him out just trying to get him to let go. How insulated was that damn suit?

Either way, he did what he'd wanted. Having suffered a double-team thrashing from the two caped heroes, he knew how desperate a fight that could be, even for someone like Ravager. At least now they were split up. But if he'd been looking for thanks, he would have had to keep searching elsewhere.

"What are you doing here, stupid?" Ravager hissed at him quietly, so as not to blatantly tip off either of their enemies that they weren't entirely on the same page. She wanted to hit him, but that would have been an outright show of team weakness.

Null was floored. Was that how you treated someone that literally saved you from an emasculating defeat? If someone would have saved him from his first Batgirl/Robin beating, he probably would have made them his best friend instead of admonishing them, "I could see you losing from where I was! What did you want me to do?"

"Your goddamn job!" Which was not supposed to entail any fighting whatsoever. None.

The thing was, Null didn't want to exactly see a partner (even temporary and entirely circumstantial as she was) get beaten up and hauled in after losing. And knowing that Ravager had a lot to prove to someone with very little patience for anything other than the best results possible, his feet carried him there.

Of course, for the sake of being argumentative, he had a completely legit-fake reason lined up and forged right on the spot.

"Well if they take you down, how long do you think it'll be before they come and get me too, you ungrateful bitch?" A+ for the improv. It wasn't exactly difficult since he was a little hot at the hostility that came from trying to step in, "Ten, fifteen minutes? You've been saying all weekend that I suck!"

"And since you suck, I feel the need to ask-," Ravager said before bringing his attention back to their current situation, "-What exactly the fuck are you gonna do now!?"

That was the best question he had received all day long. It was definitely a thinker. Unfortunately he didn't have the time to ponder the actual ramifications of the move that he'd already made. The shock value of his little stunt had already worn off in a matter of seconds.

The standoff came to an end with Batgirl's outrage, "Why would you be helping Deathstroke? I thought you were just a thief!"

She had actually thought he wasn't that bad. He just stole, and never anything important, just little things. But as far as she could see, he was helping Ravager run interference to allow Deathstroke to kill someone and fulfill a contract.

Null had no immediate answer to that. No good answer at least. His first one would have been, 'Because Catwoman screwed me over,' but that wasn't pliable for several reasons. Once again he wound up falling back on favorite standard reply, "I don't have to tell you anything."

If Null had lit the fire by showing up in the first place, Ravager gleefully threw gasoline all over it, "Ooh, scathing."

Thus, the fight began anew.

Apparently Batgirl hadn't been particularly cross with Null the first time they had dealt with one another, because she certainly was now, and he barely found himself able to defend against her. Thank goodness for Wildcat's favorite training method of periodically trying to actively beat the daylights out of him in the middle of their workout sessions. After getting somewhat accustomed to that, Batgirl's attack was manageable by comparison.

Actually able to fight back now, Null waited for her to present an opening, which came when she threw a round kick at his body that he was able to block, jabbing the point of his elbow right at her shin. With the same arm, he punched at her face with a second motion, but hit nothing but air as she turned and caught his arm over her shoulder, pulling him through to take him down with a judo technique.

He flipped through it and threw a sidekick upon landing on his feet. Batgirl blocked it, but bumped her back into Ravager's whose own fight with Robin had brought the two battles dangerously close together. Both turning and locking eyes at the same time, Batgirl ducked a swing of Ravager's katana that would have removed her head.

"Sparky, tag!" Ravager growled, prompting Null to jump over the two women forced to engage one another. On the opposite side of the battle he was met with Robin. Body now on the autopilot of combat mode, Null moved right into a fight with him, guiding him away from Ravager and Batgirl until a birdarang forced him into jumping to another roof ledge, lest he be cornered or hit with the weapons.

Robin didn't follow him over, so much as he made it there before him, "Okay, it's harder to hit you this time than it was before," Robin said, hitting Null with a punch to the face and another to the body right after the aspiring criminal made it to the other side, "I didn't think someone like you trained."

Null swallowed the grunt his body wanted to give after taking the shot to his body and trapped the offending limb under his armpit, throwing three front elbow strikes at Robin that were blocked while he was stuck in close. Realizing that everything he could do in that limited situation was going to be blocked, Null threw a quick teep kick blocked by Robin's staff, but it was only intended to shove him back and try to knock him off-balance, "How else am I gonna keep from getting my ass kicked?"

"Point taken. So-," All Null saw during Robin's next move was his cape in his face for a split-second before he felt the length of Robin's staff across his throat, "Is it working out any better?"

Robin managed to get behind him and hold him in a reverse strangling technique, bending forward just enough to hold Null's feet off of the ground, keeping him from getting any leverage to try and reverse the pressure on his neck.

Null couldn't fight back. Back elbows aimed at Robin's kidney while one hand pulled at the staff trying to get him any bit of air he could were ineffective. Kicking his legs into the air did nothing to free himself, "It… was…"

Slowly he curled his legs inward and managed to push his legs up over his head to backroll over Robin's to free himself.

Thank you sit-ups. From then onward, as long as he was physically able he would make it a habit to do at least a hundred a day, whether he was training that day or not.

But he was still losing. Robin still had a staff, he still had Null on his heels, and he had no idea what he could do to change it.

"_Sparky, right wheel kick!"_ Ravager's voice came over their comm. Connection from where she was fighting Batgirl on the fire escape of an entirely different building. The sound in his ear rang clearer than the noise of the city around them.

Null didn't know why he listened to her advice in the middle of a quick-paced fight that she wasn't even looking at. He didn't know why she wanted him to throw that kick in particular, or how she was aware that he knew how to perform that move. He didn't know how his mind and body so quickly shifted moves from what he was going to do to what he wound up doing.

Most of all, he didn't know why it worked.

The exact moment Ravager screamed at Null, Robin completely shifted to Null's right side intent on going for an open kneecap to put him down, something the aspiring thief was entirely unprepared for beforehand. Honestly, he still hadn't been prepared for it even when the heel of his foot blasted Robin in the side of the head. Clean.

Robin never saw it coming, and when it connected, he dropped.

It was the cleanest hit with a move that powerful that Null had ever hit anyone with, and Ravager had called it before it had happened without even being within sight of him.

…Okay. If that was what the fates were giving him, sure. He'd take that little stroke of luck after all of the misfortune he'd been having for the last few months.

"Robin!"

Null snapped out of his disbelief to find Batgirl heading his way, and with him standing over Robin it was the last place he wanted to be at the moment. He'd had enough of fighting for one night and turned tail. Ravager wasn't anywhere in sight and Null took that as an excuse to make a run for it. Apparently she had done the same from the distinct lack of cursing or swordplay.

Immediately getting his distance, Null jumped to the ledge of the building as Batgirl checked Robin over.

"_Come_ on _already! Go!"_

He managed to get a good look at Batgirl's glare at him under her cowl before he ran his way down the side of the building and made to disappear. She would only stay there until she could rouse Robin, and then she'd be looking for him again. Hopefully by then he'd be halfway to an extraction point. Since he'd broken her line of sight on him and would have at least thirty good seconds of a headstart, he was certain that would be enough.

Still, as he made himself scarce, he couldn't help but take note of the way she'd looked at him before his departure. It wasn't just the sort of look you gave someone to let them know that it was in their best interest to get away while they had the chance. There was more to it than that.

Disappointment. Betrayal. Regret.

He was confused as to why, but what was more important than anything else was getting himself to safety.

That was why he was long gone by the time she said something aimed at him, but unintended for his ears.

"You know," Batgirl said to herself, as if she shouldn't have expected anything less, "Before, I actually thought you weren't that bad."

XxX

The escape was quick. Ravager memorized every way to safety that Deathstroke had come up with for them and upon reconvening with Null was able to effectively guide him to an escape route where they could slow up and try to catch their breath.

They stopped temporarily at the end of a tunnel that opened up into the Gotham River, both leaning against opposite sides of the concrete pipe.

"Deathstroke's still going to kill you for breaking your role, idiot," Ravager said, nursing her injuries from the fight now that there were no more enemies within sight, "You should have just left me there."

"And miss out on you owing me one?" Null responded, "Not a chance. I didn't do that out of the goodness of my heart. I'm paying it forward here. Even if it isn't you, I'm sure the universe'll pay me back somehow," At least that was the excuse he was going with.

Ravager scoffed at him and pulled off her mask, "Karma's not a thing. And even if it was, you helped _me_ of all people. I'm pretty sure that'd get you bad karma instead."

With nothing to do but wait for a tracking signal from Deathstroke to activate to let them know where to fall back to, the two fell into a silence, but there was a gigantic elephant in the room that they hadn't gone over yet. As reluctant to bring it up as Null was, he wasn't keen on leaving it without even trying to talk about it.

"So, are you going to tell me just what the hell that was? Calling my shot for me," The teenaged thief asked uncertainly, "You couldn't even see my fight from where you were, even if you were paying attention, so how'd you know what I should have done to beat Robin?"

"It just popped into my head, okay?" Rose wasn't necessarily comfortable with it herself. Her mind was constantly buzzing as it was, but the apparent precognitive action she'd pulled on the rooftops was something she needed explained to her, "It was like I saw bird boy make that move and snap your leg like a twig, but I could see a counter to it, so I just yelled it out."

"What was it?"

"I don't know! It was just a coincidence Sparky. It's not like it matters now."

"…So, you're like, psychic or something?"

"If you have to call it something, it's called precognitive recognition," Rose started to explain before realizing that she was helping the line of questioning along instead of putting a stop to it, "But it's not something, so don't call it anything but a fluke. As a matter of fact, don't call it anything. Just forget about it."

"Alright, alright, yeesh."

"…"

"…"

Once again, an awkward silence permeated and not for the first time, Rose wondered just how Null could have been a local. He wasn't nearly ruthless enough to last in a place like Gotham City for very long. No one else that didn't have a stake in her well-being would have been advised to step in and help her.

Still, he put in the work tonight. That counted for something, "By the way, you didn't do half-bad everything considered."

"Oh," Null responded in surprise that she was saying anything to him even remotely resembling praise, "Thanks."

"You still should have run though, retard."

"Actually, I think I should have run too."

XxX

(Elsewhere in Gotham City – With Deathstroke)

As far as standoffs went, this one was less annoying than most others were to a man such as Deathstroke, because as far as he could see no monkey wrenches had been thrown into his plan of action yet.

"I should have brought more bullets," Deathstroke quipped as Batman stood away from him, crouched on the top of a billboard while he stood on the top track of a three-tiered setup at a local platform. Their fight had carried the two of them several blocks away from where they'd started from. Deathstroke knew that Batman was simply trying to put distance between him and the man he thought the assassin was targeting, so he let him believe he was getting the upper hand simply by getting him 'out of position', "And here I'd forgotten just how irksome it is to try and shoot you Bat-folk."

Playing cool as a cucumber was all well and good, but Batman knew exactly which button to push with a man like Slade Wilson, "Funny, I figured you would have remembered things from times when you lost. That certainly explains a lot."

"I _don't_ lose, Batman."

'I'm sure Dick would say otherwise,' Batman thought to himself with a ghost of a smirk on his face, "Let's go ahead and put that to the test."

He dropped off of the billboard, cape extended to let him glide down like the bat his motif was fashioned after. Deathstroke pulled his sword and swung at him, but Batman let his cape go slack earlier than anticipated and dropped to the track, rolling forward and throwing off his timing.

Slade's curse was muffled by Batman swatting his sword arm away to leave his center vulnerable to attack. Batman wrapped both hands around the back of his neck and pulled himself in for an impactful knee to the solar plexus. A second knee was blocked by Slade's forearms before he quickly shifted their position to try and run Batman through.

The stab missed by inches, but Slade continued his attack seamlessly with a twist of his arms that allowed him to bring his sword around for a slash. Batman played matador, letting the blow move through his cape to throw the contract killer off and conceal his own next move, but he wasn't facing the kind of man that the same sort ploy would work on twice.

Sticking his leg out to go with the swing of his blade, Deathstroke missed the killing blow, but he managed to slyly trip Batman up, sending him spilling to the surface of the train tracks. Visible eye shining with opportunity behind his mask, he swung the weapon downward to cleave right through his enemy, but Batman rolled away safely. Not missing a beat, Deathstroke pulled a small firearm and began shooting at the rolling Batman who kept going until he took himself over the edge of the tracks.

Deathstroke clicked his tongue and dropped himself over the other side, only to be kicked as he descended by Batman who'd stuck himself to the underside of the tracks with his grappling line to safely swing and ambush him.

Hitting the surface of the softly vibrating track hard, Deathstroke muttered to himself, "Well played…" As he got up onto one knee, he ducked his body forward, aiming his gun through his legs to take two shots at Gotham's ace hero. Not expecting to hit anything, he simply used it as a method to nimbly head-roll off of the track and flip himself back to his feet.

The rumbling of the track grew more pronounced and they soon saw why, as they both descended to the bottom track level before they could be hit by an oncoming train.

As they dropped simultaneously, Deathstroke shot three more times at Batman in the air but missed. Upon touching down, Batman came right forward and grabbed at his wrists, managing to get them both, criss-crossing Deathstroke's arms across his body. Both men threw short kicks and tried slamming their knees into the sides of each other's to break their posture and stance, but both held strong.

With their arms occupied, Deathstroke pushed his entire body forward into Batman's before attempting to headbutt him, missing his face and hitting his shoulder. The two dug their foreheads into the junction of their opponent's neck and shoulder, periodically trying to stun their adversary by slamming the side of their forehead into the spot behind the ear.

It was an attempt to jockey for position, but neither of them were going to get any further where they were. As advantageous as it would have been to get the upper-hand as thing stood, neither man was unskilled enough to allow it to happen.

With a titanic heave from both, they shoved each other back far enough to land on opposite sides of the train platform.

Despite the ferocity they had been tearing away at each other with, one wouldn't have been able to tell from looking at them. Neither looked winded in the slightest, or even particularly roughed up from the fighting.

The lull in action gave Batman a moment to notice some things. Deathstroke was definitely fighting him to kill, full-bore, but there was something off. He was apparently after the director of Gotham City's S.T.A.R. labs. That man was currently heading for the hills. The two of them had been fighting for almost fifteen minutes, and while he had been trying to keep them going in the last direction they found the director heading off in, there had been no sense of urgency behind anything he'd done in that entire span.

"What have you done?" Batman demanded to know bluntly. He didn't know something. He gravely disliked being out of the loop, any loop, "Deathstroke!" He snarled.

"Me? Nothing. Haven't you been here making sure of that?" Deathstroke said cryptically before another train ran between the two of them. Batman positioned himself in a corner of the bottom train platform to see over it, but he was gone already.

Without a second to waste, Batman threw himself into the search. This wasn't over.

What was this about?

XxX

(Central Gotham – Unfinished Traffic Tunnel)

It had taken a few more hours of waiting at the outlet of that pipe, but eventually Ravager and Null did get a GPS hit from Deathstroke that lasted all of five seconds before disappearing. That was the cue to head to the location indicated on the map to bring the mission to an end.

The end it did reach, and not a moment too soon. Walking into the service tunnel and finding Deathstroke waiting, arms crossed in a maintenance room in the back was almost welcoming after the last two days that Null had been through.

Almost, because the man still scared him to death.

"Mission a-freaking-ccomplished," Null said as he and Rose entered and separated.

Deathstroke watched him get his distance to where he could keep both Rose and himself in sight. The boy wasn't so terribly foolish as to think turning his back on any of them was wise, especially now that the mission was over.

Not saying anything at first, Deathstroke looked directly at Rose, the unspoken command to report.

"He got everything that you wanted," She said, "Didn't set off a single alarm or get spotted by any guards. There were some… complications once he got back outside, but it's fine. We're clean."

She had put her mask back on before walking in, but when she got close enough to her father he grabbed her chin and looked her face over, removing the half-mask to see just how many bruises she'd gained that night. He'd seen them on Null's face from what he could make out under the boy's hood in the low light, he had a few marks of his own.

Nodding to his daughter from what he'd taken as a clipped recanting of the night's events, he gestured her aside and turned his attention to their temporary ally, "Well? You don't get paid without proof of services rendered, boy."

Keeping his eyes locked on Deathstroke, Null opened his satchel and pulled out the flash drive and a thick black case the size of a box that would hold a laptop. He averted his eyes for just a moment to safely set those things down before returning them to the dangerous man before him, but even that was too much time to be afforded in that situation.

*BANG!*

The sudden shot rang out through the room and Null immediately hit the ground. To her credit, Rose didn't say a word. She didn't flinch, even as she saw it coming. It could have been worse, and the only thing that was surprising to her was that it wasn't.

"Goddamn it!" Null cried out, clutching at his thigh and the brand new hole that had been blown right into it by his employer, "Why? Gah, you asswipe!"

The insult slid off of the hardened assassin like water off of a duck's back.

"Ravager was doing _her job_. If she needed help, that was on her," Deathstroke explained, moving forward to step on Null's wounded leg, eliciting grunts of pain as the young man tried to hide just how much it hurt, "What you did put your own mission in jeopardy. I never told you it was okay to step in. I hired you for a job. You do that job and only that job, otherwise you jeopardize the entire point of the mission."

And it did. Null was quickly realizing just how expendable he really was. When Deathstroke shot him again for the kill, no one would be coming for revenge.

No one would even know.

"You're gonna kill me?" His skin lost all semblance of color as he stared down the barrel of the gun pointed right at his face, "I did the job AND saved your daughter! People don't usually shoot guys who do that!"

"The only reason I haven't cut off the loose end that you are, is because you actually finished your mission. Like I said from the start, I knew what I was getting when I allowed a wet-behind-the-ears child to take up a role on this assignment."

Sometimes doing the right thing wasn't doing the right thing. That was clear here with villains, even after saving one's daughter.

"They never found out I was stealing something for you," Null managed to grit out through clenched teeth, "They just thought I was extra muscle to distract them while you killed that guy you shot at."

"That's not the point," Deathstroke said, gathering up the box and the flash drive before departing without laying eyes on Null again, "A word of advice for the future. Follow. Directions. You had a role to play, nothing more. Orders aren't meant to be open to interpretation. Ravager."

Rose walked over to Null and grabbed the hand he didn't have clutching tightly to his bleeding wound, slamming a thick stack of bills into his grasp before turning and leaving him there in a red pool underneath his leg.

She didn't say a word to him, and he didn't to her, but she did glance back at him before she left him in the room. He wanted help badly, but instead of asking, which he knew would not go over positively, Null figured he'd be better off crawling or hopping to a medical center on his own. Silently jerking his head, not trusting his voice to hold up if he spoke, he asked her to just go.

And so she did. The exchange took less than four seconds, with only the closing of the service tunnel door behind her signifying her departure.

"Fuck this gig," Null muttered to himself in the still silence of his solitude.

Being a criminal really blew. So far, it was the most awful thing he'd ever tried his hand at, and nothing was even close by comparison. Any plus side he'd somehow come across since day one had been ruthlessly smothered and strangled before being buried alive by the negatives. Why would anyone actually _want_ to do this for a living?

Then he looked at the fat stack in his hand the size of his fist, and things started making sense again in the universe. He had never even seen that much money in one place before.

Just how much was he supposed to have made on this job again? Between the adrenaline of the mission, getting shot in the leg, and the lovely lump of currency in his hand, the intended number had happened to slip his mind.

XxX

(The Next Day – Sunday Evening – Max's Apartment)

A benefit to living in Gotham City; most of the time, emergency room doctors didn't tend to ask too many questions when you dragged yourself into the hospital with bruises and a gunshot wound.

It didn't take very long other than sitting in a waiting room for two hours to wait for some guy to pull a slug out of his thigh, and then getting said slug pulled out of his thigh, which in of itself didn't take long but felt like an eternity while it happened.

"Slade Wilson is a dick," Max muttered to himself, hobbling his way up the stairs of his apartment building with the help of one crutch. Every motion of his injured right leg made his entire body ache right from the root of the offended nerve endings that had been shot. No painkillers either. He didn't have time to nurse an addiction, and he didn't even want to risk it. Riding his recovery period out on a constant cloud of pain and discomfort was the preferable choice.

Thanks a lot health class drug-scare videos.

Eventually, amid much grumbling and cursing of people, places, and things of various and sundry natures, Max made it to his floor and unlocked the door to the home he'd left for the majority of the weekend. It was almost enough to make him laugh. He was fighting his tail off for a crappy one-bedroom apartment when he'd just traversed half of Gotham City with a little less than fifty-thousand dollars in his bag. He probably could have paid for a better place in a better neighborhood on his way home instead of just coming back.

'Eh, I can't move,' Max thought to himself, carefully sitting down on the couch and taking his bag off to rest it in the seat beside him, 'What, am I just gonna disappear or something? Move on up or whatever?' As if that wouldn't be a big red flag. As long as he had a choice he wasn't going to give anyone the slightest excuse to tag him to any of his criminal escapades, 'So I've got to stay broke… at least until college or something.'

Hey, college. He could actually pay for it now, because God knows a scholarship wouldn't have ever been in the cards for him. He had way more than enough. The chances of him using 50 grand in twenty months was incredibly slim, and it wasn't like he wasn't going to keep stealing and get more of it after he healed up.

While unpacking his satchel from his bag in preparation of stashing it away until the next time he needed, Max found something that he hadn't put inside of it before heading out. Actually, he didn't remember putting it in there at all.

A phone. A cheap, disposable, prepaid cell phone that anyone could purchase from a retail store and activate for a handful of bucks in a matter of minutes. Max hadn't bought it. He didn't know anyone he'd need a disposable phone to even contact.

Checking it over to find something informative about its origins, he looked through it. It had sixty minutes on it and only one number programmed into it.

…

Why not? Curiosity may have killed the cat, but he wasn't a cat. He wasn't anything at all.

Besides, the only way something worse than what had already happened over the weekend could take place around him was if somebody busted in and killed him or threw him in handcuffs at that very moment. With that nonchalant notion in mind, he hit the dial key to sate his interest. It rang all of once before it was picked up on the other end, and he could almost hear the smug in the speaker's voice.

"_Took you long enough to find it and make the call."_

Rose? What the hell?

Max held the phone away from his ear to stare at it for a second before placing it back to his head, "…Did you slip a burner phone on me?"

"_Is that really important?"_

"No, but that's _really _creepy," Max admitted, pulling a wooden chair over to idly prop his injured leg up on later after he got resituated in his apartment, "I don't even remember you being close enough to my satchel for you to do something like that," And when did she go out and get a prepaid phone of all things?

"_Well you can throw it out after this for all I care,"_ She snapped in return,_ "I just wanted to say something to you, and I didn't feel like pushing your luck after Deathstroke already shot you once,"_ Touche. As the daughter of said callous psychopath, she would know what would cause him to renege on his mercy and outright put a bullet in his head, _"I just wanted to say, thanks. And I'm not letting this stand. I… owe you one."_

It sounded like swallowing ash would have been easier for her than saying those last four words to him had been.

"Well, you're welcome," Max said, hobbling his way around his apartment with one crutch while he held the phone, "But not telling me that while Deathstroke might have been able to hear you say it kind of counts as returning the favor," Because as far as Max was concerned, Deathstroke would have definitely killed him if she had.

An irritated growl followed over the line, _"Keep being a smartass and I'll shoot you in the other leg myself for symmetry the next time I see you,"_ Now that was more like it. All of that 'thanking him' crap was starting to make him feel like he was getting set up.

"I thought you were trying to be nice," He also thought that she didn't like guns.

"_That's why I'd shoot you in the other leg and not in the gut… or the balls,"_ Max shut his mouth quite promptly. With that family, nothing they said was to be taken as embellishment, _"Anyway, count on me finding you eventually Sparky. I _don't_ like owing debts."_

For some reason he felt more threatened at being owed a favor from someone like Rose than if he'd been on her bad side. Chances were, she would have probably been less irritable if he had been instead of the alternative.

Stumped as to what he could say, Max just fell back on polite acceptance of the 'offer', "Err… looking forward to it," All he got was a grumble before Rose hung up on him, leaving him with a humorless laugh of disbelief, "…What the fuck is happening in my life?"

The daughter of the scariest guy he'd ever met, who hired him and shot him in the meat of the thigh afterwards, apparently felt a reluctant sense of gratitude after he helped her fight off living, breathing superheroes.

She knew, or was learning how, to fight superheroes.

Perhaps he'd hold on to that phone, at least for a little while.

XxX

(Some Time Later - Batcave)

It had been days since the run-in with Deathstroke, and while it had been business as usual with the normal workload of the nightly patrols and training, the cloud of just what had happened that night hung over the heads of the hero sect.

S.T.A.R. Labs had been burgled that night in the small window that Batman and company had been occupied, and the perpetrator had managed to get away. This led to the assumption of the culprit being Null. It fit together too neatly that this occurred while Ravager and Deathstroke had the attention of the only people in the immediate vicinity that could probably catch him.

Even if they caught him one day though, they wouldn't be able to pin that particular wrongdoing on him. He had never been caught on any sort of security system or camera inside, and Batgirl and Robin had never seen any of the things he had taken to confirm his part in that particular crime.

S.T.A.R Labs weren't very forthcoming with information on what had been taken from them. In the end, that wouldn't have stopped Bruce from figuring out what it was. But at the moment, he wasn't speaking with them on it, or much of anything. He had high expectations for his charges, and for himself, and being swerved in any situation irked him considerably.

He wasn't the only one smarting from the run-in.

Tim had taken being knocked out by Null very seriously. Within the span of a couple of months, Null had gone from an athletic nuisance to being fairly decent in straight combat, but even with his improved technique and odd electric nuance that he'd pulled on Barbara, he shouldn't have won that fight.

One mistake, and after days and days of running through every move he'd made, remembering everything he recalled Null trying, and he couldn't see how Null would have known what to look for and what to use to counter him and win.

As far as Barbara could see from what she'd been told and Tim's repeated walkthroughs of the fight in training, it had been a fluke. It had been too randomly perfect of circumstances to be anything else.

Once again, the two of them had worked through the ending sequence of the fight, where Null had landed the incalculably perfect kick to stop Tim in his tracks just before he could injure his knee and take him out of commission.

"I don't know anyone who would have even thought to throw a kick like that at that exact moment," Tim said, taking note of his own posture and movement with his staff. He was a perfectionist, and figuring out how he lost was a must. You had to take a lesson away from everything, especially in failure.

Barbara sighed and put a hand on his shoulder before moving out of the sparring area. They had been at it for the better part of an hour, simply going over the exact run-through, and no progress toward understanding had been reached, "That's enough for tonight. Save some energy for later," They still had to head out and patrol.

Tim looked at her long and hard before eventually agreeing. Null wasn't going to show his face anywhere anytime soon without being forced to, and there were threats in Gotham City that would show their faces if they focused in on any particular one of them at a time. Prioritizing was key to handling all that they could for what the city's underworld had to offer.

The work involved never ended, and that much was evident when as they left the training area of the cave they found their mentor/boss, Bruce Wayne.

It was the first time that they had seen him in-person in days. Instead of saying anything to let them know of his presence while they had been training or choosing to observe them while they had been, he had taken a seat at the Batcave central computer, a contemplative look on his face instead of the last unpleased scowl he had left them with the night after the Deathstroke fight.

"Well he's not classified as petty anymore," Bruce said, knowing they had realized that he was there without even needing to see them, "Whatever the information he took was, what we can definitely confirm he got away with is dangerous enough on its own. Whether he still has it or not, it's not a Gotham problem anymore. What he took won't ever even come into play in this area."

He was debating contacting the Justice League over it. It would have been the best option, to let them know what Null had taken and given to Deathstroke of all people.

Barbara frowned at the bit of information and the refusal to name Null by his alias. A major chunk was being left out and she wasn't fond of it, "Well, what else did he steal then?"

The billionaire vigilante didn't bother turning around, needing to figure out just how much of a problem this was or would be in the near future, "S.T.A.R. Labs has a confirmed cache of a particularly rare extraterrestrial element, meant to be used for study," And that was what Null had taken away, "Of course, it's also a weapon in regards to a handful of people in particular."

Tim's eyes quickly widened. Putting two-and-two together hadn't been difficult even with such a vague explanation, "Oh no."

It didn't need to be said, but Bruce said it anyway, just to drive the point home.

"Deathstroke got Null to steal a share of the Kryptonite from S.T.A.R. Labs."

S.T.A.R. Labs managed to collect a significant amount that had fallen into Gotham Bay when Supergirl's Kryptonite-encased rocket to Earth had broken through the atmosphere for the purpose of study. But of course with the Gotham City branch being focused on weaponry, there was little doubt that there was a combat basis to the study at that particular laboratory.

Null had stolen one of the only things that could bring the strongest man in the world to his knees and handed it over to a career killer who had already been capable of going toe-to-toe with members of the Justice League before.

Did he know what he'd taken? If he did, was he aware of why it was even important? Whether he was a stupid teenager or not, this made him a problem.

If any misstep or oversight on Bruce's part wound up with someone good to the world getting killed, Bruce wouldn't have been able to forgive himself. Yes, the big man in blue himself needed to know since Kryptonite was involved, and there was a good chance that Null would wind up coming into the conversation when the topic arose of how Deathstroke managed to get it.

…Just another day.

* * *

**Alright, that's the chapter.**

**I had concerns about this, mostly centered around Max. If I spent too much time dealing with his background right off the bat, I figured that'd get too overbearing, so I was just planning on adding more about it over time. There aren't that many layers to it really. He's supposed to represent a person with the most normal foundation and basest reasoning for stepping into this that I can dredge up for this universe. He has little to no knowledge to what he's gotten into, and will steadily learn as things happen.**

**A good number of these things will vary, but in the long run will make things worse in the scope of his wanting to get out cleanly.**

**So the introductory arc is over. Next will be the 'rabbit hole' arc, which I'm certain you can ascertain the meaning behind.**

**Okay, now seeing as how most of my fans that followed me into this probably have only a cursory knowledge of what's up in the DC Universe, I bid that you turn to your friendly DC Wiki when you're confused. I'll be doing my best to lay things out as clearly as I can without screwing the pooch with unnecessary explanation, but knowing what's up in your own right might help you get a better feel for what I'm aiming for with character motivations when I have them interact.**

**Anyway, I hope you enjoyed. Until the next time, Kenchi out.**


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